Photographs are paired with individual poems from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Whitman was a working class, gay New Yorker, whose formal education ended when he was eleven years old. Not the bio one expects of ''America's Poet" nor the revolutionary poet who created modern free verse. Whitman used photography as a model for his poetry. Poetry and photography are both abstractions of reality. They transform an experience into a memory. The book begins with an essay about Whitman's world and life, his love of photography, and its influence on his poetry. The 47 new photographs in this book reflect the emotional content of Whitman's poems.