It is perhaps unsurprising that the above – an entry from Whitman's 1857 journals – has become a favourite with his scholarly readers. Twenty-five years ago, Herbert J. Levine could describe these cryptic jottings as ‘often quoted’, a description inevitably more accurate now than it was in 1987. Projecting his third edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman identifies his collection's expansion and evolution as his ‘main life work’. However, it is the poet's audacity and ambition that give this entry its primary appeal, Whitman claiming the mantle of an American sacred, his Leaves proposed as a ‘New Bible’, which is projected ‘to be read in 1859’. Reconsidered in light of the complex transmissions that are our focus, Whitman's creative bravado seems especially significant, as well as especially suspect. How novel, how ‘new’, is Whitman's ‘New Bible’, exactly? To what extent is his ‘great construction’ of Leaves merely an act of reconstruction – a modern translation of scriptural precedents, rather than an original American genesis?