Our edit of the best Walt Whitman poems
Walt Whitman was a groundbreaking American poet, best known for poems such as ‘Song of Myself’ and ‘I Sing the Body Electric’. Here, we’ve selected some of the very best Walt Whitman poetry.

Walt Whitman self published Leaves of Grass in 1855 as a collection of twelve poems, but revised and expanded it throughout his lifetime. His poems abandoned the regular 19th century rhythm and rhyming patterns and were open about love and democracy, sex and friendship, the body and the soul. Inspired by his travels through the American frontier, his visits to soldiers during the Civil War and his lifetime as a working man, Whitman was a revolutionary to his peers. He paved the way for a new type of poetry and influenced poets such as Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams.
The Macmillan Collector’s Library edition of Leaves of Grass: Selected Poems is taken from Whitman’s final version, the Deathbed edition, and features his most loved works.
Discover our edit of the best poetry books.
An extract from 'I Sing the Body Electric'
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
Read the full poem here.
Shut Not Your Doors
Shut not your doors to me proud libraries,
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d
shelves, yet needed most, I bring,
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every
thing,
A book separate, not link’d with the rest nor felt by
the intellect,
But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.
To the States
To the States or any one of them, or any city of the
States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this
earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.
For You O Democracy
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever
shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all
the rivers of America, and along the shores of
the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about
each other’s necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you
ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.
To a Stranger
Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly
I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking,
(it comes to me as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid,
affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl
with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has
become not yours only nor left my body mine
only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh,
as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands,
in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when
I sit alone or wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
We Two Boys Together Clinging
We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going, North and South
excursions making,
Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,
Arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,
No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering,
thieving, threatening,
Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water
drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking,
feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.