Excerpt from Modern American Poetry: An Anthology Whitman, who was to influence future generations so profoundly in Europe as well as in America, had already appeared. The third edition of that stupendous volume, Leaves of Grass, had been printed in 1860. Almost im mediately after, the publisher failed and the book passed out of public notice. But private scrutiny was keen. In 1865 a petty Oflicial discovered that Whitman was the author Of the notorious Leaves of Grass and, in spite Of his great sacrifices in nursing hundreds of wounded soldiers, in Spite of his many past services and his present poverty, the Offending poet was dismissed from his small clerkship in the Department of the Interior at Wash ington, D. C. Other reverses followed rapidly. But Whitman, broken in health and cheated by his exploiters, lived to see not only a seventh edition of his great work published in 1881, but a complete collection printed in his seventy-third year (1892) in which the twelve poems of the experimental first edition had grown to nearly four hundred. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.