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The three or four poets

About This Item

  • Title: The three or four poets
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: tul.00002
  • Source: Walt Whitman Ephemera, University of Tulsa. Transcribed from digital images of the original. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the manuscripts, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s, as he was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript features draft lines of the third poem in that edition, eventually titled "To Think of Time."
  • Related Item(s):
    • On the back of this leaf are notes toward a poem about "a perfect school." See tul.00011.
    • See wwa.00159.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "The three or four poets." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 19 April 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: tul.00002.xml (TEI)

Key

Textual Feature Appearance
Overwritten brown with strikethrough
Added inline purple with double underline
Uncertain gray with wavy underline
Supplied from another source turquoise with brackets
Metamark green with triple underline
Long deletion gray background with top and bottom border
  [begin leaf 1 recto] The great three or four poets ^of the stretch of the are well . . . . the wellknown  
  names of leaders and inventors . . . .  
 the rich owners and the ^pious and distinguished; —may be well, ? But what are of all the rest?—Are Is there  
 none of account but ^of poets and the distinguished  
 and the [illegible] the owners ^and pious? ? Are the ignorant and wicked nothing? Are the interminable races hordes of Asia and  
 Africa nothing Are the [illegible] common people of Europe  
  and America nothing? Are the American aborigines and the neg nothing? Are Is the a zZambo and the or a ^foreheadless cCrowfoot  
 or the a Camanche nothing? Is the a wretched young polluted man, thievish, —a thief,  
 uneducated, polluted, rank, swiftly  
 dying with the polluting rank sickness, nothing? Is the Are the infected in the immigrant  
 hospital nothing? Are the perpetual successions of  
 shallow persons and frivolous persons nothing?   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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