Had Whitman omitted the few poems whose titles are given here, doubtless a few readers would have found his formless verses either curious or ludicrous, or merely stupid, and others would have passed them by as unmeriting even casual attention. The poems which are chiefly responsible for a controversy which raged for half a century, are these: I sing the body electric. A woman waits for me. To a common prostitute. The dalliance of the eagles. Wholly dissociated from the picturesque personality from which the book emanated, Leaves of Grass bears a unique story margined on its pages. The sprawling types whose muddy imprint on the ill-proportioned pages made up the uncouth first edition of the book, were put together by the author's hands, and the sorry press work was his handiwork as well. The unusual preface and the twelve poems that followed he wrote in the open, while lounging on the wharves, while crossing on ferry-boats, while loitering in the fields, while sitting on the tops of omnibuses. His physical materials were the stubs of pencils, the backs of used envelopes, scraps of paper that easily came to hand. The same open-air workshops and like crude tools of writing he utilized for nearly forty years. During the thirty-seven years that intervened between the first printing of his Leaves and his death in 1892, he followed as his chief purpose in life the task he had set himself at the beginning of his serious authorship--the cumulative expression of personality in the larger sense which is manifest in the successive and expanding editions of his Leaves of Grass. That book becomes therefore, a life history. Incompletely as he may have performed this self-imposed task, his own explanation of his purpose may well be accepted as made in good faith. That explanation appears in the preface to the 1876 edition, and amid the multitude of paper scraps that came into the possession of his executors, following his passing away, may be found similar clues: "It was originally my intention, after chanting in Leaves of Grass the songs of the body and of existence, to then compose a further, equally-needed volume, based on those convictions of perpetuity and conservation which, enveloping all precedents, make the unseen soul govern absolutely at last. I meant, while in a sort continuing the theme of my first chants, to shift the slides and exhibit the problem and paradox of the same ardent and fully appointed personality entering the sphere of the resistless gravitation of spiritual law, and with cheerful face estimating death, not at all as the cessation, but as somehow what I feel it must be, the entrance upon by far the greater part of existence, and something that life is at least as much for, as it is for itself."