The first edition of Walt Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass was an anonymous, slim volume boasting a curious frontispiece. It featured an engraving of Whitman in full beard and working clothes, one hand in his pocket, the other on his hip. The jaunty, earthy image he presented was meant to emphasize the informal, personal nature of the poems.

The strange book was sold in a handful of bookstores around New York. Of the eight hundred copies printed, only two hundred were bound. In the introduction of Signet Classic's 1955 edition of Leaves of Grass, Gay Wilson Allen wrote, "Today Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is almost universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of world literature, but it did not have an impressive beginning." Its free verse was lost on many of Whitman's critics. In 1856, the reviewer in Crayon 3 writes,

With a wonderful vigor of thought and intensity...