The Walt Whitman Archive
In Whitman's Hand
Manuscripts
About this Item
Title: Such boundless and affluent souls
Creator: Walt Whitman
Date: Between 1850 and 1856
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00017
Source: Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Transcribed from digital images of the original. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of manuscripts, see our statement of editorial policy.
Editorial note: Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:203). The second paragraph of the manuscript includes phrases and ideas similar to lines from the poem "Miracles," which was first published as "Poem of Perfect Miracles" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. An image of the verso is currently unavailable.
Contributors to digital file: Kirsten Clawson, Janel Cayer, Kevin McMullen, Nicole Gray, Kenneth M. Price, and Brett Barney
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Such boundless and affluent souls. . . . . . . bend your head in reverence, my man! they are met through all the strata of life.—Their centrifugal power of love, I think, makes the awfullest forces of nature stand back.—Its perennial blow the frost shall never touch; and what we call death shall go round outside it forever and ever.—
(Every hour of the day and night, and every [song?] acre of the earth and shore, and every point and ^or patch of the sea and sky, is full of beautiful pictures.—No two of this immortal brood are alike; except that they all alike in their ^are all alike of unspeakable beauty and perfection, and ^large and small, alike, descend into that greedy Something in Man whose appetite, ^is more undying than hope, and more ravenous insatiate than the sand is [illegible] with water, appears at his side with [at?] his holy baldness flits at his side like a ghost)