Author: Walt Whitman
Narrator: Edoardo Ballerini
Unabridged: 1 hr 47 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Reluctant Poet, Inc.
Published: 06/02/2026
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was the son of a carpenter. His formal schooling ended at age eleven, when he was apprenticed to a printer in Brooklyn. He spent the next two decades as a printer, freelance writer, and editor in New York. In 1855, at his own expense, he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which would mark him as the major poetic voice of an emerging America. Whitman would go on expanding and revising it for the rest of his life, with the final edition appearing in 1892, the year of his death.
Called “in a class by himself” by Oprah Daily, and “a master in his field” by The New York Times, Edoardo Ballerini is an award-winning and celebrated narrator of audiobooks.
Facile and arrogant blowhard or thoroughgoing genius of conveying human experience, I don’t much care. Walt Whitman crafted some of the most pivotal poetry in history. Whether it was all for what we now call clout or an outpouring of praise for humanity in all of its messy contradictions, Song of My......more
Well, one thing I gathered from this poem is that Walt Whitman loves himself, and he loves America. To his mind, America is everything; it is freedom; it is democracy; it is happiness, and, again, according to him, it is the most poetic place on Earth. Through this he is trying to establish a unifie......more
The first six sections of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself present a myriad of issues both in subject matter and style. Reading these sections is a very different experience from reading a sonnet or even blank verse. Whitman's form was revolutionary when it arrived on the literary scene, and it contin......more