Introduction

Libraries of criticism have grown up around those literary works which humanity has found most challenging, but it seems safe to say that there has never been a book more intimately bound up with the history of its reception than Leaves of Grass. From the moment it made its appearance in the world early in July 1855, it was the destiny of this singular imaginative production which, the author later implied, was to be taken less as a work of art than as a piece out of a man’s life, to be ‘enveloped in the dust of controversy’.