Leaves of Grass

I’ll admit: I approached this audiobook with skepticism. Whitman’s reputation as the ‘father of free verse’ can make him feel like homework, and I’ve suffered through enough stiff, reverential readings of classics to dread another. But Sam Torode’s narration changed my mind within minutes. He doesn’t *act* the poems so much as *inhabit* them, letting Whitman’s contradictions—his swagger and vulnerability, his cosmic grandeur and dirt-under-the-nails grit—coexist without irony. The opening lines of *Song of Myself* land like a challenge, not a lecture, and Torode’s pacing is masterful: he lingers on Whitman’s catalogs of laborers and landscapes just long enough to let the images accumulate, but never so long that the energy sags. That said, this isn’t a flawless listen. Torode’s delivery occasionally flattens the more experimental sections (the choppy, fragmented *Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking* loses some of its hypnotic weirdness here), and Whitman’s longer enumerations—while thrilling on the page—can feel monotonous in audio when strung together. The production, too, is so minimalist it borders on sparse; a hint of ambient sound (a distant train whistle, a crowd murmur) might’ve deepened the immersion. But these are quibbles. What Torode captures, brilliantly, is Whitman’s *urgency*—the sense that these poems aren’t just art, but a manifesto, a dare, a love letter to a country still figuring itself out. If you’ve ever wondered why people call Whitman ‘America’s poet,’ this audiobook will show you. Just don’t listen to it passively; it demands you argue back, cheer, or at least *feel* something. And honestly? That’s the point.