This project came about as a desire to fashion a biography relating the poetry to specific life experiences of Whitman and to select poems for that study that seemed most appealing for for the today's readers around the world. Such a selection should be printed in a form to fulfill Whitman's stated wish that his poems be read out of doors, so such a selection would be pocket-sized. Another consideration was that in looking on the internet for such a selection, I found none and even finding easy access to the poems without some interrupting scholarly matter or idiosyncratic webmaster's design stylizations seemed too difficult a task for most readers attempting such a search. The biography and the on-line Whitman poetry selection are still works-in-progress. One suggestion for the interested Whitman reader after reading the "essential poetry" (given here) is to compare variant versions Whitman wrote of particular poems: click here for such explorations.