Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Literary Manuscripts
  3. Loose Manuscripts
  4. duk.00051

I know as well as

About This Item

  • Title: I know as well as
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: duk.00051
  • 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 the manuscripts, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines from the manuscript appear in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The ideas and some of the language are also similar to other early manuscripts that relate to the second poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves, ultimately titled "A Song for Occupations," and part of a cluster titled "Debris" that appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass (see "Priests," "Do I not prove myself," and "[Fa]bles, traditions").
  • Related Item(s):
    • A series of notes written on the back of this manuscript are dated March 20, 1854. See duk.00887.
    • See wwa.00065.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "I know as well as." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: duk.00051.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] over I know as well as you that the Bibles iare ^divine revelations of God But I know say that any each leaf of grass and every each hair of my 
  breast and beard is ^also equally also a a more developed revelation 
  of God just as divine But Do you stop there? Have you no more faith than that? Can you I live in no such infinitessimal meanness as that? Do you Would you bribe God the Lord ^Adonais with same stray change? I disdain and denounce your shallow I ^ outbid you, shallow hucksters! Such infirm All you have ever pile up said and done compiled composed is are not august 
  enough to dent endow answer tally a leaf of grass the partition of in my nostrils; nose; ^I say that All the churches ever built now standing fail of were richly pious well  
  employed in orisons to one a twig from 
  an sprig of parsley; ^I tell you All ^that your caste have said ever said about Go narrated said  
  and about ^Belus Haephestos God ^Osiris and [illegible] Belus and Jehovah is a ^too shallow description 
  fonr one man's soul; I see ^claim these for that fr one of those framers ^over the way, framing the a house.— in that each man more 
  the young man, ^there with rolled up shirt-sleeves and 
  sweat on his divine superb face, more than your craft [cut away] [illegible] three thousand years ago [illegible]for Kronos or Zeus his  
 son or Hercules his grandson.   [begin leaf 1 verso]
Back to top