INTRODUCTION THE FIRST EDITION of Leaves of Grass, as placed on sale July 4, 1855, bears little outside or inside resemblance to any of the later editions, which kept growing larger as Whitman added new poems. The original work is a thin folio about the size and shape of a block of typewriting paper. The binding is of dark-green pebbled cloth, and the title is stamped in gold, with the rustic letters sending down roots and sprout- ing above into leaves. Inside the binding are ninety-five printed pages, numbered iv-xii and 14-95. A prose introduction is set in double columns on the roman-numeraled pages, and the remaining text con- sists of twelve poems, as compared with 383 in the final or "Deathbed" edition. The first poem, later called "Song of Myself," is longer than the other eleven together. There is no table of contents, and none of the poems has a title.
Another calculated feature of the first edition is that the names of the author and the publisher-actually the same person-are omitted from the title page. Instead the opposite page contains a portrait: the engraved daguerreotype of a bearded man in his middle thirties, slouching under a wide-brimmed and high-crowned black felt hat that has "a rakish kind of slant," as the engraver said later, "like the mast of a schooner." His right hand is resting nonchalantly on his hip; the left is hidden in the pocket of his coarse-woven trousers. He wears no coat or waistcoat, and his shirt is thrown wide open at the collar to reveal a burly neck and the top of what seems to be a red-flannel undershirt. It is the portrait of a devil-may-care American working- man, one who might be taken as a somewhat idealized figure in al- most any crowd.
Walt Whitman was born on 31 May, 1819 Long Island, New York. On 4 July, 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the volume of poems that for the next four decades would become his lifes work, was placed on sale. Although some critics treated the volume as a joke and others were outraged by its unprecedented mixture of mysticism and earthiness, the book attracted the attention of some of the finest literary intelligences. His poetry slowly achieved a wide readership in America and in England, where he was praised by Swinburne and Tennyson. (D. H. Lawrence later referred to Whitman as the"greatest modern poet, and"the greatest of Americans. Whitman suffered a stroke in 1873 and was forced to retire to Camden, New Jersey, where he would spend the last twenty years of his life. There he continued to write poetry, and in 1881 the seventh edition of Leaves of Grass was published to generally favorable reviews. However, the book was soon banned in Boston on the grounds that it was obscene literature. In January 1892 the final edition of Leaves of Grass appeared on sale, and Whitman's life work was complete. He died two months later on the evening of 26 March, 1892, and was buried four days afterward at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden.
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