-Third Edition

The third edition of Leaves of Grass was the first to be released by a professional publisher rather than self-published by Whitman himself. The firm of Thayer and Eldridge was known for publishing abolitionist texts, and they had aspirations to support avant-garde writers like Whitman before going bankrupt during the economic upheaval of the Civil War. The 1860 Leaves of Grass features the first appearance of Whitman’s groundbreaking cluster of poems about love between men, “Calamus.”