A Pleasant Quiz [Review of <hi rend="italic">Leaves of Grass</hi> (1855)] a machine readable transcription unsigned unknown Kenneth M. Price Ed Folsom Transcription and encoding Natalie O'Neal Elizabeth Lorang Vanessa Steinroetter Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln University of Iowa National Endowment for the Humanities The United States Department of Education 2015 The Walt Whitman Archive
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 anc.00272 unsigned unknown A Pleasant Quiz The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature 8 September 1855 14 36 429

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 updated author encoding in TEI header updated rights language and added encoding description in TEI header converted to P5 transcribed and encoded "A Pleasant Quiz"

Under the title "Walt Whitman and his Poems," the United States Review recently published the following article. We take it to be a smart satire upon the present tendency of authors to run into rhapsody and transcendentalism; and therefore its main fault in a literary point of view—that it suggests the notice of a man reviewing his own work—is not of much importance.

This introductory paragraph is followed by a reprint of one of Whitman's own reviews of the 1855 Leaves of Grass. Whitman's review, "Walt Whitman and His Poems," was first published in the United States Review in September, 1855. Strictly speaking, then, the excerpt from "A Pleasant Quiz" given above is not a review itself, but rather a comment on a previous review. We reproduce the comment here because of the light it sheds on Whitman's contemporary reception and on his practice of reviewing himself. The poet's self-reviewing was detected right from the start, possibly as he himself wanted it to be.