Title: No patriotism
Creator: Walt Whitman
Date: Undated
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03402
Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the marginalia and annotations, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Lauren Grewe, Ty Alyea, Matt Cohen, and Nicole Gray
A certain smell taint of having consulted authorities.—
The English dread of being ^quizzed or laughed at—a [illegible]^—a certain formality & limit— ne as of one who has never lost a clergyman's restraint metes & bounds—
Of course ^the amount of what Emerson gives us is better than the old conventionalism of literature, but the da
Instead of ^the Storm beating, the wind blowing, free, the the savage throat, the ecstasy and abandon of the prarie, the dashing sea, we have always a polite person, amid a well-dressed assembly, in a parlor, talking about Plutarch, Astronomy, ? ? good behaviour, the impropriety of laughing &c. and evidently dominated by the English
A certain snobbishness even—
what is the good if ^after all it ^really only substi- tutes another conventionalism
We want freedom, strength faith, self-support, cleanness
What have we?