The Self-Made Poet

Walt Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, setting some of the type himself. Ralph Waldo Emerson called it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." The book contained just twelve poems, but Whitman would revise and expand it for the rest of his life.

Whitman abandoned rhyme and regular meter entirely in favor of long free-verse lines that mimicked the rhythms of natural speech and biblical prophecy. He created a new prosody — a new way of organizing sound in poetry — that permanently altered what English-language verse could be.