This volume includes Whitman's handwritten manuscript version of the twelve "Live oak, with moss" poems along side with a print transcription of these poems on the opposite page, followed by a facsimile of the original version of the "Calamus" poems published in the 1860-61 edition of Leaves of grass, and a reprint of the final version of the "Calamus" poems in the 1881 edition of Leaves of grass.

Betsy Erkkila is the Henry Sanborn Noyes Professor of Literature at Northwestern University. She is the author of Mixed Bloods and Other American Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars, The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord, Whitman the Political Poet, and Walt Whitman among the French: Poet and Myth.