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Others may praise what they like

About This Item

  • Title: Others may praise what they like
  • Date: About 1865
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: yal.00079
  • Source: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 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: This manuscript, a draft of "Others May Praise What They Like," was likely written shortly before the poem's publication in Drum Taps (1865). Perhaps because this poem did not treat the war, Whitman moved it from Drum-Taps into Passage to India, and ultimately into the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster of Leaves of Grass.
  • Related Item(s):
    • On the back of this leaf is a crossed-out fragment of an undated draft letter to an unspecified correspondent. Although Ted Genoways has dated this letter (and the manuscript draft) to late 1879 or early 1880, just after Whitman's trip to the western U.S. in 1879 (The Correspondence [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004], 57), it seems more likely that the draft letter is probably from 1860 and meant for Thayer and Eldridge. When Whitman was preparing the third edition of Leaves of Grass, he was eager to have his publishers press for sales in the west. In his anonymous self-review, "All About a Mocking-Bird," Whitman said of his new volume: "The market needs to-day to be supplied—the great West especially—with copious thousands of copies" (New York Saturday Press [7 January 1860], 3). See yal.00433.
    • See wwa.00040.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Others may praise what they like." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 23 April 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: yal.00079.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]

Others may praise what  
 they like.

Others may praise what they  
 like, But I, from the banks of the  
 running Missouri, praise  
 nothing, in art or aught  
 else Till it has breathed of the  
 atmosphere of this river, —  
 or of the prairies of Illinois  
 & Indiana, And fully exudes it again.   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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