The book that invented American poetry. Whitman's long, cataloguing lines, his promiscuous embrace of everyone and everything, his insistence on the body as sacred, his democracy of subjects (grass, whores, ants, presidents, himself) broke all existing poetic rules and established new ones. "Song of Myself" remains the most comprehensive self-portrait in American literature. Every subsequent American poet has had to reckon with Whitman.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.