The reader is thus presented with all the poems that Whitman approved of publishing—allegedly approved of, in the case of Old Age Echoes—at some time during his life. Spanning almost sixty years and ranging widely in quality, the poems are interesting not only in their own right, but also for Whitman’s reasons for excluding them from the definitive canon of the “Death-bed” Edition.

Sensitive to the public’s curiosity concerning his development as a poet, but aware that much of his juvenilia was readily available in old newspapers, Whitman decided to publish some of his early pieces in an appendix to Collect (1882) entitled “Pieces in Early Youth, 1834-‘42.” “My serious wish were to have all those crude and boyish pieces quietly dropp’d in oblivion—but to avoid the annoyance of their surreptitious issue, (as lately announced, from outsiders), I have, with some qualms, tack’d them on here,” he writes in Collect’s prefatory note. And yet the four poems, nine short stories, and a “Talk to an Art-Union” represented only a fraction of his early efforts; additionally, the works were often heavily revised to hide flaws of his early style.

Twenty-three poems written by Whitman were published before 1855. The awkwardness of Whitman’s language and the conventional rhyme schemes and imagery will surprise anyone familiar with the energy and independence of his mature verse. Some of these pieces (like “The Death and Burial of McDonald Clarke” and “Young Grimes”) are directly imitative of popular poems of the time; others (“The Mississippi at Midnight”) are sensationalistic; still others (“Our Future Lot,” “The Punishment of Pride”) are didactic or overtly pious. One senses the insecurities of Whitman as man and artist: Trying so hard to please the average reader of New York’s penny-daily newspapers, he has forgotten himself and his own voice.

Yet there are signs of the great poetry to be written in the next decade. “Resurgemus” and “The House of Friends” indicate that Whitman’s political awareness was growing in the early 1850s; his interest in diverse peoples and cultures is exhibited in “The Spanish Lady” and “The Inca’s Daughter.” “Our Future Lot” and “The Love That Is Hereafter” are written on the themes of death and rebirth, key issues for his finest poems, including “The Sleepers” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”

For more examples of Whitman’s pre-1855 writings, see Thomas L. Brasher’s edition of Early Poems and the Fiction (see “For Further Reading”), Emory Holloway’s edition of Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, and the two-volume edition of The Journalism. Whitman’s temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842), is also available (New York: Random House, 1929).

There are several problems with the idea of considering the “Death-bed” Edition as “definitive.” For one, though the 1891-1892 edition contains Whitman’s greatest works, the style and sometimes the language of these poems reflects Whitman’s more controlled and conservative “late style” rather than the original energy and rawness of his message in the 1850s and 1860s. A quick comparison between the 1855 and 1891-1892 versions of “Song of Myself” is a case in point. In time, Whitman substituted the ellipses and irregular line lengths with more conventional punctuation and more even-tempered flow of language; he also removed blatantly provocative lines—“I hear the trained soprano.... she convulses me like the climax of my love-grip” on p. 57—with more demure observations—“I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)” on p. 218. The “good gray poet” idea of Whitman is a lifetime away from the young rebel of 1855, and readers should be aware that the poetry reflects those changes in Whitman the man and poet. Knowing where he began and ended is a good way to gain a knowledge of the poet, but a stronger understanding comes from looking into his “stops” along the way—including the sexually charged 1860 edition, the strong patriotism of Drum-Taps (1865), the melancholy dreaminess of so many of the 1871 poems.

The 1891-1892 Edition of Leaves of Grass is also not a “complete” edition, simply because Whitman dropped earlier poems and pieces of poems along the way. Why did he do so? The most obvious answer is that Whitman recognized the poorer quality of certain pieces; at other times, however, the older poet seems to have had second thoughts about an earlier opinion or feeling. In the interest of providing a more nuanced view of the poet’s work, this selection includes the poems that appeared in one or more editions of Whitman’s poems but were omitted by Whitman from the culminating edition of Leaves of Grass. In other words, these are poems that might “fall through the cracks” for readers acquainted only with Whitman’s two best-known collections.

The thirteen works date from 1855 to Whitman’s actual death bed (Traubel noted that “A Thought of Columbus” was Whitman’s “last deliberate composition”) and range in quality from sketches for longer projects (“Then Shall Perceive”) to carefully revised works (“Supplement Hours”) and even a few previously published poems (such as “A Kiss to the Bride” and “Death’s Valley”).