Goal - 3 books 108 pages
Total - 3 books 31 pages
Result - 77 pages to reach goal
Yesterday was an all-reviews day. The last part of the book is mostly reviews of Leaves from when it first came out. I finished them all though, and now only have a few pages left of that book which is a letter or two between Whitman and another famous poet of the day who admired him, Emerson.
It was actually kind of fun reading the reviews. Some were fair and balanced and sort of in puzzled amazement at this new kind of work.
Some were hilariously his own ghost-written self-reviews, written as if he were an unbiased reviewer. What is so funny about them is he doesn't bother hiding his writing style; the reviews are written as if they're an extension of the book, lol, just so obvious. I have to wonder if people immediately knew he might've written them or not. I know from reading later reviews from England, where he'd sent reviewers copies of the book with his self-reviews as if they were objective reviews, that some of the English reviewers mentioned the fact and either acted naively surprised at such an overwhelmingly positive reaction to his work or actually seemed a bit suspicious, without outright saying it. So I have to think at least some people were smart enough to be suspicious of his obvious self-reviews.
(By the way, at this point, it's also interesting to note that when he first printed the book, he sent no reviewers copies of the book as many reviewers noted which was very unusual, and many reviewers said that he'd made it known that his work, instead of being advertised normally, would just be accepted or not as people saw fit and that Whitman didn't care one way or the other. So it's interesting that in less than a year, he was sending out copies to reviewers in England with self-reviews attached, lol.)
Some reviews near the end of the book were scathing attacks on it, and those were the funniest. Because these were the ones most offended by its sexual content. I've always thought extreme social conservatives of our day were funny, and it's interesting to see that they exist with almost exactly the same type of silly objections then as they do now. Basically, some reviewers said the work should be outlawed so that it doesn't decay and destroy the social fabric of modest civilisation that has been around thousands of years. Sound familiar to anything nowadays?
One reviewer even went as far as to say that Whitman deserves whipping and execution! I am not kidding!
Another obsesses over the fact that Whitman also likes animals. During Leaves, Whitman sees everything, not just animals, but at points talks about them innocently, just like he imagines being other people, he also imagines living as an animal. Well, this reviewer goes on a tangent about bestiality and such and it's just utterly ridiculous and I can't believe that a literary publication printed that.
Here's an example from one silly scathing review:
"Walt Whitman libels the highest type of humanity, and calls his free speech the true utterance of a man; we, who may have been misdirected by civilisation, call it the expression of a beast."
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