Walt whitman how many poems

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble, I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades, With the life-long love of comrades.

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme! For you, for you I am trilling these songs. Read the full poem, here. First published in but expanded and revisited throughout his lifetime, Leaves of Grass is a classic collection of poetry from the great American poet, Walt Whitman.

Direct, unembellished and revolutionary for its time, the collection comprises twelve beautiful poems that explore democracy, the United States, its people, the body, desire and the self. Sign up here. Ready for your next read? An extract from 'I Sing the Body Electric' I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

To the States To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

For You O Democracy Come, I will make the continent indissoluble, I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades, With the life-long love of comrades. He continued to teach until , when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. In Brooklyn, he continued to develop the unique style of poetry that later so astonished Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In , Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass , which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Emerson in July of Whitman released a second edition of the book in , containing thirty-two poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in response.

During his lifetime, Whitman continued to refine the volume, publishing several more editions of the book. Noted Whitman scholar, M. He worked as a freelance journalist and visited the wounded at New York City—area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.

Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the hospitals; he ended up staying in the city for eleven years.

He took a job as a clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass , which Harlan found offensive. After Harlan fired him, he went on to work in the attorney general's office. In , Whitman suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. He ended up staying with his brother until the publication of Leaves of Grass James R.

Osgood , which brought him enough money to buy a home in Camden. In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining years working on additions and revisions to his deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass David McKay, —92 and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye My Fancy David McKay, After his death on March 26, , Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery. Osgood, Passage to India J. Redfield, Leaves of Grass J.

But the start of the Civil War drove the publishing company out of business, furthering Whitman's financial struggles as a pirated copy of Leaves came to be available for some time. In later , Whitman traveled to Fredericksburg to search for his brother George, who fought for the Union and was being treated there for a wound he suffered. Whitman moved to Washington, D. This volunteer work proved to be both life-changing and exhausting. By his own rough estimates, Whitman made hospital visits and saw anywhere from 80, to , patients.

The work took a toll physically, but also propelled him to return to poetry. In , he published a new collection called Drum-Taps , which represented a more solemn realization of what the Civil War meant for those in the thick of it as seen with poems like "Beat! In the immediate years after the Civil War, Whitman continued to visit wounded veterans. Soon after the war, he met Peter Doyle, a young Confederate soldier and train car conductor. Whitman, who had a quiet history of becoming close with younger men amidst a time of great taboo around homosexuality, developed an instant and intense romantic bond with Doyle.

As Whitman's health began to unravel in the s, Doyle helped nurse him back to health. The two's relationship experienced a number of changes over the ensuing years, with Whitman believed to have suffered greatly from feeling rejected by Doyle, though the two would later remain friends. In the mids, Whitman had found steady work in Washington as a clerk at the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior. He continued to pursue literary projects, and in , he published two new collections, Democratic Vistas and Passage to India , along with a fifth edition of Leaves of Grass.

But in his life took a dramatic turn for the worse. In January of that year, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. In May he traveled to Camden, New Jersey, to see his ailing mother, who died just three days after his arrival. Frail himself, Whitman found it impossible to continue with his job in Washington and relocated to Camden to live with his brother George and sister-in-law Lou.

Over the next two decades, Whitman continued to tinker with Leaves of Grass. An edition of the collection earned the poet some fresh newspaper coverage after a Boston district attorney objected to and blocked its publication.

That, in turn, resulted in robust sales, enough so that Whitman was able to buy a modest house of his own in Camden. These final years proved to be both fruitful and frustrating for Whitman. His life's work received much-needed validation in terms of recognition, especially overseas, as over the course of his career many of his contemporaries had viewed his output as prurient, distasteful and unsophisticated.

Yet even as Whitman felt new appreciation, the America he saw emerge from the Civil War disappointed him. His health, too, continued to deteriorate. On March 26, , Whitman passed away in Camden. Right up until the end, he'd continued to work with Leaves of Grass , which during his lifetime had gone through many editions and expanded to some poems.

Whitman's final book, Good-Bye, My Fancy , was published the year before his death. He was buried in a large mausoleum he had built in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery.