poems
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This website offers many ways to experience the Calamus poems. You can read the texts, watch the films, or read the texts while listening to the audio.
You may want to start with this brief introduction, which offers biographical context and highlights key themes.
We recommend that—at least once—you read the poems in order, as Whitman first arranged them. You can also watch a continuous version of all 45 poems here.
Below each poem you can click on a “Read Commentary” button for more information and analysis.
Whitman revised the poems substantially in subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass. Below each poem you’ll find a “compare all versions” button giving you access to the texts from 1867, 1871, and 1881.
1. In paths untrodden
2. Scented herbage of my breast
3. Whoever you are holding me now in hand
4. These I, singing in spring, collect for lovers
5. States!
6. Not heaving from my ribbed breast only
7. Of the terrible question of appearances
8. Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice me
9. Hours continuing, long, sore and heavy-hearted
10. You bards of ages hence!
11. When I heard at the close of the day
12. Are you the new person drawn toward me
13. Calamus taste
14. Not heat flames up and consumes
15. O drops of me!
16. Who is now reading this?
17. Of him I love day and night, I dreamed I heard he was dead
18. City of my walks and joys!
19. Mind you the timid models of the rest, the majority?
20. I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing
21. Music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning
22. Passing stranger!
23. This moment as I sit alone, yearning and thoughtful
24. I hear it is charged against me that I seek to destroy institutions
25. The prairie-grass dividing
26. We two boys together clinging
27. O love!
28. When I peruse the conquered fame of heroes
29. One flitting glimpse, caught through an interstice
30. A promise and gift to California
31. What ship, puzzled at sea, cons for the true reckoning?
32. What think you I take my pen in hand to record?
33. No labor-saving machine
34. I dreamed in a dream, I saw a city invincible
35. To you of New England
36. Earth! my likeness!
37. A leaf for hand in hand!
38. Primeval my love for the woman I love
39. Sometimes with one I love
40. That shadow, my likeness, that goes to and fro
41. Among the men and women, the multitude
42. To the young man, many things to absorb
43. O you whom I often and silently come where you are
44. Here my last words, and the most baffling
