The Selected Short Poems of Walt Whitman presents the best long poems by America's greatest poet. Unlike other editions of Whitman's poetry, we print the earliest and most powerful version of each poem, drawing from each edition of Leaves of Grass that Whitman published between 1855 and 1892.

Walt Whitman was born in 1819 on Long Island. His early life was devoted to journalism, and throughout the 1840s he contributed fiction, essays, and more traditional poetry to many New York newspapers. The first edition of Leaves of Grass was published at the poet's own expense in 1855, and until his death in 1892 the book went through numerous revisions and expansions. While he did receive the early support of Ralph Waldo Emerson, many in the wider literary and public world were unable to forgive his frank treatment of sexuality, and the apparent formlessness of his poems. Whitman spent much of the Civil War in Washington, D.C., frequenting the soldier hospitals and caring for the wounded and dying. After the war, he become a guru of sorts to a handful of followers who vehemently defended his work, and many writers - including Oscar Wilde, in 1882 - began to make pilgrimages to Whitman's home in his later years. When he died in Camden, New Jersey, in 1892, the New York Times declared "we cannot call him a great poet unless we deny poetry to be an art." It is now recognized that he redefined poetry as no American had before or since.