Leaves of Grass

#538
Title: Leaves of Grass
Author: Walt Whitman
Publisher: ?
Year: 1854
333 pages

I read a public domain edition and calculated the page count. Whitman kept revising until his death, so it's a little hard to say which revision I read. I know it wasn't the first edition.

This was the fourth of the "encyclopedic" books I read simultaneously from DailyLit. Whitman is sometimes more a thesaurus than a poet, pouring forth endless lists of synonyms, related ideas, associate professions, and the like. This may help account for the varying quality of the poems, some of which are indeed exultant, joyous, transcendent, all-encompassing; others, however, are quite dull, mundane, and seem to lack a raison d'etre.