Summer, the season for relaxing, resting and catching up on reading. I've been ordering copious amounts of library books for my two tropical vacations, and while doing so, reading lots of reviews, and this might be my favorite:
"But multitudinousness cannot make the spectacle of his morbidness any more acceptable. It cannot palliate the gross impropriety of which he is guilty, in publishing what is unfit for repetition; an impropriety doubled by the retention of this disgusting stuff in a new edition issued after many years, during which the author has had ample opportunity to free himself from his youthful crudities. Every one imbued with the "primal sanities" must be revolted by this offense, and protest against it. Fortunately, however, the chief damage done will be to the author himself, who thus dishonors his own physical nature; for imperfect though the race is, it still remains so much purer than the stained and distorted reflection of its animalism in Leaves of Grass, that the book cannot attain to any very wide influence."
--1882 review of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in The Atlantic
For more reviews of famous classics, click
here.
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