The Portable Walt WhitmanBy: Walt Whitman A comprehensive collection of Whitman's most beloved works of poetry, prose, and short stories When Walt Whitman self published Leaves of Grass in 1855 it was a slim volume of twelve poems and he was a journalist and poet from Long Island, little known but full of ambition and poetic fire. To give a new voice to the new nation shaken by civil war, he spent his entire life revising and adding to the work, but his initial act of bravado