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New Books

About This Item

  • Title: New Books
  • Date: 26 May 1860
  • Creator(s): Anonymous
  • Whitman Archive ID: anc.02004
  • Source: Boston Saturday Evening Gazette 26 May 1860.

    The electronic text for this file was prepared by Whitman Archive staff, who transcribed the text from a representation of the original (e.g., digital scan or other electronic reproduction, microfilm copy).

     For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the reviews, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Contributors to digital file: Ashley Lawson Kyle Barton Janel Cayer Elizabeth Lorang
  • Cite this page: Anonymous,. "New Books." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 04 November 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: anc.02004.xml (TEI)

NEW BOOKS.

Look here, Walt Whitman, what made you write this book, these Leaves of Grass, full of good thoughts, bad thoughts, naughty thoughts, noble thoughts. Ideas politic, impolitic, incomprehensible, insane, inexpressive, impure, invigorating, infuscatable, and infoliate. Did you do it to make pennies, dimes, dollars, eagles, spondulics, rhino, That Walt Whitman—human Walt, might row, ride, riot, regale, recuperate, refocilate— At Hull, Hingham, Nahant, Newport, Rye, Niagara, Shirley, Long Island, Cohasset, Bergen Point, Cape May, or the Mountains called White? Perhaps you did, but then again perhaps you didn’t, for the didn’t is resumptive in this world. And you are anti-resumptive, reticular, responsive and restringent. You’ve made a book, it can’t be rubbed out for it is a fact. Rub out the stars, Declaration of Independence, habeas corpus, magna charta, squatter sovereignty, little Giant, old Abe. Rub out sun, moon, clouds, streams, Board of Aldermen, Japanese Embassy, lapstreak, shell, canoe, Rub out Boston Common, Battery, Girard College, Old Man of the Mountain, Franklin street, horse railroads, Baltimore Convention, But rub out Leaves of Grass—456 pages, electro-typed, beautiful print, fine type, elegant binding, seemly, comely, white paper—published by Thayer & Eldridge,—it cannot be did.
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