Anniversary exhibitions built around the publication of an author's Major Work often have a dutiful air. Books in first and subsequent editions are prettily arranged in glass cases, along with relevant manuscripts, photographs and ephemera. And don't forget the lock of hair, neatly braided or twirled just so, supplying the illusion that the great man (or woman) is somehow just out of sight.

You blink and imagine the hair on the head, the head on the body, the writer sprung to life, asking, as we do, why this, why now, what other than a dot on a calendar has brought us all, squinting and reverent, into this dim, sober, marbled room?

To the credit of Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, the exhibition he has mounted on the 150th anniversary of the first edition of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is commemoration with a point of view. That is a good thing, because Whitman's poem is one of those literary mazes, with passages brilliant and tedious, through which it is possible to follow dozens if not hundreds of ideas. Even when the book is regarded merely as an object, with its nine (or more) separate editions and countless other issues in Whitman's lifetime alone, the story is a dense one.

So what is driving the show "I Am With You" other than the nice round number of years that have elapsed since July 4, 1855, when Whitman, a former schoolteacher, printer, journalist and editor, first published his bold, unruly and groundbreaking poem? Drawing on the library's extensive holdings, Mr. Gewirtz has put on display at least one copy of every authorized American edition of "Leaves," along with the separate collections of poetry that Whitman later incorporated into his work, which he expanded, rearranged and revised nearly until the day he died.