This is where Whitman explores the idea that the relationships men have with each other are incomplete until they explore all levels of love, friendship, and intimacy. Whitman explores in depth the love that men feel for each other, be it brotherly love, familial love, or sexual love. The most controversial section of the book, “Calamus,” is noted for its clear autoerotic and homosexual themes. This is where he creates his own poetic world and describes the desires of the human soul. It is where Whitman describes his perspective on the quintessential modern man, which he has come to find through nature and his own personal journey of self-discovery. The third section, “Song of Myself,”was one of the first written. All his poems, Whitman says, are written with the soul in mind. Whitman describes the people and places that have influenced him along the way, and describes their impact on his soul. The second segment, “Starting from Paumanok,” serves as a road map for the book where Whitman describes his own literary journey, starting with his childhood home on Long Island. This segment contains poems relating to politics, society, personal affairs, and sexual affairs-all concepts he expands on later in the work. The focus of the work is what Whitman refers to as “one’s self,” referring to Whitman’s self, the reader’s self, and an all-encompassing self within the nation. The opening segment, “Inscriptions,” gives the reader an overview of the work and an introduction to the author’s perspective.
Leaves of Grass is divided into several sections. However, it has become one of the most enduring works of American poetry, still widely read and studied today as one of Whitman’s defining works. Highly controversial upon its release due to its explicit sexual imagery, the book was panned by most poetry critics during Whitman’s lifetime.
The format of the poems shifts radically, and does not tend to follow standard rules for meter and line length. Heavily influenced by the Transcendentalist movement and the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poems fuse praise of the human form and the human mind. Unlike most poems at the time, which relied on religious symbolism and allegory, Leaves of Grass concentrated on exalting the body and the material world. The book of poems explores the theme of delight in sensual pleasures at a time when candid displays of pleasure were considered immoral. The poems are loosely connected, representing Whitman’s celebration of his philosophy of life and humanity. The original volume was a small book of twelve poems, while the final version was a compilation of more than four hundred. Leaves of Grass (1855), a poetry collection by American author and poet Walt Whitman, was rewritten and reissued multiple times during Whitman’s lifetime.
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