About the book
Across a lifetime of revisions, Walt Whitman grew his poetry collection from a slim first edition of twelve untitled poems into a compilation of more than 400. Written in free verse with little rhyme or regular meter, the poems celebrate nature, the body, the senses and sexual love, and catalogue the breadth of American democracy. Their frankness drew charges of immorality and the scorn of many critics. Whitman paid for the first edition and set much of its type himself, partly answering Ralph Waldo Emerson's call for a new American poet. Its poems include I Sing the Body Electric, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and Song of Myself.
Jack Dorsey likens poetry to programming, since both compress abstract ideas into a form open to interpretation, and admires Whitman as an entrepreneur who published the collection himself.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Jack Dorsey (CEO/Twitter)
I love the poets. Poetry is kind of like programming–it’s densifying very abstract concepts into a medium that allows interpretation. People can make the work their own and have better, more creative answers in life. Really anything that helps us reflect a bit more interests me.
Whitman’s also an interesting character, a total entrepreneur. He self-published 35,000 copies of Leaves of Grass. He was publishing it during the time of the Civil War and it’s an edgy, questioning book. It questions racial equality, sexual equality, gender equality, all in one work. And he kept changing it until he died–adding to it, editing it, and republishing it. Most people read the last version but I think the first version is actually the best.
The efficiency of every line in that poem, much like great programming, is stunning.
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