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One of the great innovative figures in American letters, Walt Whitman created a daring new kind of poetry that became a major force in world literature. His poems have been woven into the very fabric of the American character and have continued to provide inspiration to people and poets for generations.

Leaves of Grass is Whitman's masterpiece, written in a pure, uninhibited style and combining sensual and mystical sensibilities. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essay The Poet inspired the work, praised it, saying I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed. Self-published in 1855, it was repeatedly expanded and revised by Whitman throughout the rest of his life. This recording follows the final, most complete edition which appeared in 1892, the year of Whitman's death.

Among the poems in the collection are Song of Myself, I Sing the Body Electric, and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, Whitman's elegy to the assassinated president Abraham Lincoln.

Robin Field is the AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator of numerous audiobooks, as well as an award-winning actor, singer, writer, and lyricist whose career has spanned six decades. He has starred on and off Broadway, headlined at Carnegie Hall, authored numerous musical reviews, and hosted or performed on a number of television and radio programs over the years.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was the son of a carpenter. His formal schooling ended at age eleven, when he was apprenticed to a printer in Brooklyn. He spent the next two decades as a printer, freelance writer, and editor in New York. In 1855, at his own expense, he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which would mark him as the major poetic voice of an emerging America. Whitman would go on expanding and revising it for the rest of his life, with the final edition appearing in 1892, the year of his death.