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left with Andrew

About This Item

  • Title: left with Andrew
  • Date: 1854 or 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: tex.00001
  • Source: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 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 shows a listing of the poems for the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, with working titles, as well as various mathematical calculations relating to the length and arrangment of the volume. It was likely composed in 1854 or early in 1855. Ed Folsom has written at length about this manuscript and its significance. See "Walt Whitman's Working Notes for the First Edition of Leaves of Grass," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 16 (Fall 1998), 90–95.
  • Related Item(s):
    • A series of draft lines on the back of this manuscript relate to several of the poems that appeared in the first edition of Leaves of Grass. See tex.00057.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "left with Andrew." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 19 April 2026. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: tex.00001.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] left with Andrew 
  5 pages MS. figure 
  A large ship under her full power of steady forward motion
  • 40
  • 40
  • 1600
  • 5
  • 8000
  • 28 lines
  • 40 letters
  • 1120
 1120 letters in page of Skakspere's poems 1600 letters in one of my closely written MS pages like page 2 [illegible]
1120) 8000 (7
7840
160
1600
4
1160) 6400 (5
5800
600
2 for frontispiece & fly
2 for title & blank
15—1
13 2
12 3 I celebrate myself ✓
9 4
13 5
4½ A young man came to me ✓ 
  A child went forth ✓
4 sauntering the pavement, ✓
9 great are the myths, ✓
9 I wander all night
10 Come closer to me ✓
5 Who learns my lesson complete & 
  Clear the way there Jonathan ✓
2 Resurgemus
5— Road and others To think through the retrospection ✓
3 Blacks ✓
127
1600
76200
127
1120) 203200 (181
1120
9120
8960
1600
1120
about 127 pages MS 1600 letters to page   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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