Whitman’s Signature Work Turns 150

“Devotees and scholars of the writer Walt Whitman are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the original edition of his seminal work, Leaves of Grass, the concise volume of 12 poems that pushed the boundaries of social decency and of poetry itself. By rejecting the rigid structures of British metre, Whitman offered readers free-spirited bursts of consciousness that forever changed American poetry… Experts suspect only a few hundred copies of the original edition exist and are using the anniversary to try to count them.”