In May 1860, Walt Whitman published a third edition of Leaves of Grass. His timing was compelling. Printed during a period of regional, ideological, and political divisions, written by a poet intimately concerned with the idea of a United States as “essentially the greatest poem,” this new edition was Whitman’s last best hope for national salvation. Now available in a facsimile edition, Leaves of Grass, 1860 faithfully reproduces Whitman’s attempt to create a “Great construction of the New Bible” to save the nation on the eve of civil war and, for the first time, frames the book in historical rather than literary terms.

In his third edition, Whitman added 146 new poems to the 32 that comprised the second edition, reorganized the book into a bible of American civic religion that could be cited chapter and verse, and included erotic poetry intended to bind the nation in organic harmony. This 150th anniversary edition includes a facsimile reproduction of the original 1860 volume, a thought-provoking introduction by antebellum historian and Whitman scholar Jason Stacy that situates Whitman in nineteenth-century America, and annotations that provide detailed historical context for Whitman’s poems.

A profoundly rich product of a period when America faced its greatest peril, this third edition finds the poet transforming himself into a prophet of spiritual democracy and the Whitman we celebrate today—boisterous, barbaric, and benevolent. Reprinting it now continues the poet’s goal of proclaiming for “the whole of America for each / individual, without exception . . . uncompromising liberty and equality.”

Tracing the troubled roots of American capitalism and imperialism
 
Coedited by noted Masters scholar, Jason Stacy, and his class, “Editing History,” this annotated edition of Edgar Lee Masters’s The New Star Chamber and Other Essays reappears at a perilous time in US history, when large corporations and overseas conflicts once again threaten the integrity of American rights and liberties, and the United States still finds itself beholden to corporate power and the legacy of imperial hubris. In speaking to his times, Masters also speaks to ours.
 
These thirteen essays lay bare the political ideology that informed Spoon River Anthology. Masters argues that the dangerous imperialism championed by then-President Theodore Roosevelt was rooted in the Constitution itself. By debating the ethics of the Philippine-American War, criticizing Hamiltonian centralization of government, and extolling the virtues of Jeffersonian individualism, Masters elucidates the ways in which America had strayed from its constitutional morals and from democracy itself. The result is a compelling critique of corporate capitalism and burgeoning American imperialism, as well as an exemplary source for understanding its complicated author in the midst of his transformation from urban lawyer to poet of rural America.
 
In print again for the first time since 1904, this edition includes an introduction and historical annotations throughout. Edited and annotated by students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and designed and illustrated by students at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, this volume traces economic and political pathologies to the origins of the American republic. The New Star Chamber and Other Essays is as vital now as it was over 100 years ago.

Long before he was a celebrated poet, Walt Whitman was a working journalist. By the time he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman had edited three newspapers and published thousands of reviews, editorials, and human-interest stories in newspapers in and around New York City. Yet for decades, much of his journalism has been difficult to access or even find. For the first time, Walt Whitman’s Selected Journalism thematically and chronologically organizes a compelling selection of Whitman’s journalism from the late 1830s to the Civil War. It includes writings from the poet’s first immersion into the burgeoning democratic culture of antebellum America to the war that transformed both the poet and the nation.

Walt Whitman’s Selected Journalism covers Whitman’s early years as a part-time editorialist and ambivalent schoolteacher between 1838 and 1841. After 1841, it follows his work as a dedicated full-time newspaperman and editor, most prominently at the New York Aurora and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle between 1842 and 1848. After 1848 and up to the Civil War, Whitman’s journalism shows his slow transformation from daily newspaper editor to poet. This volume gathers journalism from throughout these early years in his career, focusing on reporting, reviews, and editorials on politics and democratic culture, the arts, and the social debates of his day. It also includes some of Whitman’s best early reportage, in the form of the short, personal pieces he wrote that aimed to give his readers a sense of immediacy of experience as he guided them through various aspects of daily life in America’s largest metropolis.

Over time, journalism’s limitations pushed Whitman to seek another medium to capture and describe the world and the experience of America with words. In this light, today’s readers of Whitman are doubly indebted to his career in journalism. In presenting Whitman-the-journalist in his own words here, and with useful context and annotations by renowned scholars, Walt Whitman’s Selected Journalism illuminates for readers the future poet’s earliest attempts to speak on behalf of and to the entire American republic.