About this Item

Title: (Of the great poet)

Creator: Walt Whitman

Date: About 1855

Whitman Archive ID: duk.00128

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: This manuscript, likely written in the early to mid-1850s, includes notes that anticipate the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Imagery and phrases in the second paragraph of the first leaf are reminscent of lines in both the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself" and the poem eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric." Another line on the first leaf appeared in a slightly different form in "Poem of The Singers, and of The Words of Poems" in the 1856 edition of Leaves (a poem later titled "Song of the Answerer"). The stated desire for "satisfiers" and "lovers" (found here on the bottom of the second leaf) appears in "Poem of Many in One," also first published in the 1856 edition and later titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore." When Richard Maurice Bucke printed a transcription of this manuscript, he added the following words to the end of leaf 2, recto: "These frothing, maddening waves are to be" (Notes and Fragments [London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., 1899], 129). The words do not appear on the present manuscript. Edward Grier notes that Floyd Stovall has connected material on the third leaf to Whitman's "reading of H. N. Hudson's 'Thoughts on Reading,' American Whig Review, 1 (May 1845), 483–496, which he clipped and annotated" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:95).