Ralph Waldo Emerson issued a call for a great poet to capture and immortalize the unique American experience. In 1855, an answer came with Leaves of Grass. Today, this masterful collection remains not only a seminal event in American literature but also the incomparable achievement of one of America"s greatest poets - an exuberant, passionate man who loved his country and wrote of it as no other has ever done. Singer, thinker, visionary, and citizen extraordinaire, Walt Whitman was all this and more. Thoreau called Whitman "probably the greatest democrat that ever lived," and Emerson judged Leaves of Grass as "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed." The text presented here is that of the "Deathbed" or ninth edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1892. The content and grouping of poems represent the text authorized by Whitman himself, for the final and complete version of his masterpiece.