The dj has a closed chip 30x53mm with a clumsy title hand-printed on the spine; spine tanned. Book has a couple of under-linings, an annotation and a single p of notes on a blank p at rear (which could be removed on request); otherwise all pages clean and unmarked. xlii plus468pp. Whitman’s “poetry” is blank un-rhymed verse so he perhaps is more of a philosopher.

Whitman is apparently the greatest democrat the world has seen. wrote Henry David Thoreau after reading Leaves of Grass and visiting its author in 1855. Certainly among democratic poets there is not another of his stature. More radical writers there have been in perennial plenty, but none has so passionately preached the democratic virtues of liberty, fraternity and equality as guides in the making of the self-reliant modern man and in the planning of a protective, as opposed to paternalistic or leviathan, state. None has been so faithful to the freedoms essential to growth, as distinguished from the forms, the enactments and the chosen leaders of government. With the triumph of the democratic ideal, new significance will attach to such a poet, in his own land and in all lands. As an historical an prophetic interpretation of democracy, and a s the poetic autobiography of a specimen product of that culture, Leaves of Grass is, as its author declared, a nation announcing itself.