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True Conquerors

About This Item

  • Title: True Conquerors
  • Date: 15 February 1888
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.00095
  • Source: New York Herald 15 February 1888: 6. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm copy of an original issue. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the periodical poems, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Contributors to digital file: Elizabeth Lorang April Lambert Susan Belasco
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "True Conquerors." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 15 December 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.00095.xml (TEI)
per.00095.007per.00095.007_cropped

TRUE CONQUERORS.1

Old farmers, travellers, workmen (no matter 
  how crippled or bent), Old sailors, out of many a perilous voyage, 
  storm and wreck, Old soldiers from campaigns, with all their 
  wounds, defeats and scars; Enough that they've survived it all—long life's 
  unflinching ones! Forth from their struggles, trials, fights, to have 
  emerged at all—in that alone, True conquerors of life o'er all the rest. WALT WHITMAN.

Notes

1. Reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888). The Herald printing of "True Conquerors" differs slightly from the poem's later printing in "Sands at Seventy." The fourth line of the "Sands at Seventy" version reads, "Enough that they've survived at all—long life's unflinching ones," and the final line omits the words "of life." [back]

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