1871—Fifth Edition. A total of two hundred and seventy-three poems are here classified under general titles, including for the first time, Passage to India, and After All Not to Create Only, groups which prior to this date were issued separately.
1876—Sixth Edition. This issue was intended as a Centennial edition, and it includes Two Rivulets; there are two hundred and ninety-eight poems.
1881—Seventh Edition. Intended as the completion of a design extending over a period of twenty-six years, Whitman had undertaken an extensive revision of what he termed his bible of democracy. There are three hundred and eighteen poems. This is the edition abandoned by the publishers because threatened with prosecution by the district attorney.
1889—Eighth Edition. In celebration of the author’s seventieth birthday, a special autograph edition of three hundred copies was issued.
1892—Ninth Edition. Whitman supervised the make-up of this issue during his last illness.
1897—Tenth Edition. Here appeared for the first time, Old Age Echoes, numbering thirteen poems.
1902—Eleventh and Definitive Edition. Issued by the literary executors of Walt Whitman—Horace L. Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas B. Harned.
There have been six editions of Whitman’s complete writings, and numerous selections from Leaves of Grass have been published under the editorship of well-known literary men—among them, William M. Rossetti, Ernest Rhys, W. T. Stead, and Oscar L. Triggs. There have been translations into German, French, Italian, Russian, and several Asiatic languages.
“I had my choice when I commenc’d,” he notes in his Backward Glance of 1880; “I bid neither for soft eulogies, big money returns, nor the approbation of existing schools and conventions.... Unstopp’d and unwarp’d by any influence outside the soul within me, I have had my say entirely my own way, and put it unerringly on record—the value thereof to be decided by time.”