"This year, Walt Whitman devotees and scholars are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the original 1855 edition, the concise masterpiece of just 12 poems that pushed the boundaries of social decency and of poetry itself. By rejecting the rigid structures of British meter, Whitman offered readers free-spirited bursts of consciousness that forever changed American poetry."

"'The final ‘Leaves of Grass’ is an enormous book, with which Whitman did not do himself a favor because a lot of the poetry is pure padding, purely hot air,” said biographer Justin Kaplan. “But if you go back to the original, it’s a wonderfully sparse little book, something like 96 pages of absolutely remarkable, stunning poetry.'"

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