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Annotated Bibliography on “Song of Myself” • Whitman, Walt. “Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass.” Concise Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Leah Jewell. 5th Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001. 1018-1032 Walt Whitman had a modest upbringing, but it was one in which he knew early he wanted to devote his life to literature. He was born in New York in 1819 to a carpenter’s family of nine. Whitman began to learn the trade of writing and publication by age 12, when he took a job as a printer’s assistant. He continued printing and teaching until 1841, when he turned to journalism full time and began fully immersing himself in literature. Whitman saw his poetry not only as a creation of the self, but indeed a piece of the self and a reflection of American society as a whole. On the first edition of Leaves of Grass Whitman purposely leaves his name off of the front cover. He chose instead, only to leave a picture of himself in a casual pose as if there was a universal understanding that he was not the only single creator of these ideas, but merely a participant in a greater purpose. In essence, Whitman’s goal seems to be overcoming all boundaries geographic, sp