Accompanied by: "Notes from the editors" (22 p. : ill., ports. ; 20 cm.).

"The 100 greatest masterpieces. . .is published under the auspices of the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration."

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass took various forms during the poet's lifetime. The 1855 first edition was a thin pamphlet of 12 poems; the great final edition encompassed more than 300. It is the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass--commonly called "the Deathbed Edition" that remains the bard's definitive version of what is indisputably an American classic. In Leaves of Grass, Whitman abandoned traditional Victorian poetic forms and language, handled decidedly unconventional subjects and themes, and evoked so personal a tone and so candid a voice that the book offended the few people who read it in the first edition.