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Great are the myths

About This Item

  • Title: Great are the myths
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: duk.00259
  • 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. The opening lines of the manuscript appear in the twelfth poem of that edition, eventually titled "Great are the Myths." The poem went through many revisions through the different editions of Leaves of Grass, then was permanently dropped in 1881–1882, except the two couplets that became the poem "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night."
  • Related Item(s):
    • On the back of this manuscript is a partial draft of "Memorial in Behalf of a Freer Municipal Government, and Against Sunday Restrictions," printed in the Brooklyn Star on October 20, 1854. See duk.00938.
    • See wwa.00572.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Great are the myths." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 26 April 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: duk.00259.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] —(of firemen or fireengines, Great are the myths . . . . I too delight in them, Great are Adam and Eve . . . . I too look back and accept them, Great between them and me the risen and fallen 
  nations, and their poets, women, sages, 
  rulers, warriors and priests.— And that's so, easy enough; And I am no shallowpate to go gadding about 
  singing them ^above the rest, and deferring to them; And they did not become great by singing and deferring. ? out Great are you . . . . and great am I, We are just as good and bad as the oldest or youngest or nearest any, What the best and the worst did we can do, What they felt—do we not feel it in ourselves? What they thought—do we not think the same?   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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