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[Fa]bles, traditions

About This Item

  • Title: [Fa]bles, traditions
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: duk.00261
  • Source: Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Transcribed from digital images of the original item. 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 ideas and language relate to the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." This connection is reinforced by the supplied first line, added to a transcription of the manuscript that appears in Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899): "foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he was tried for forgery" (47). This line, which matches a line in the 1855 version of "Song of Myself," is not currently written on the manuscript. In language, ideas, and structure, the last few lines of this manuscript also resemble lines 39–43 in the untitled fourteenth poem of the "Debris" cluster of the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript is also similar to other early manuscripts that relate to these poems and to the second poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves, eventually titled "A Song for Occupations" (see "Priests," "Do I not prove myself," and "I know as well as").
  • Related Item(s):
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "[Fa]bles, traditions." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: duk.00261.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] foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he was tried for forgery Fables, traditions, and books formulas are not animate things; Brick and mortar do not procreate like men; [cut away] all of them and all existing creeds grows not so much of God as I grow in my moustache, And I am myself waiting my time to be a God; And I think I h shall ^do as much good and be as pure and prodigious, and do  
 as much good as any;— And when my do, I am, do you suppose it will please me 
  to receive puffs from pulpits or print? IYou cannot go with ^go with your testaments among ten men without 
  wrangling and unbelief Go, with your logic and testaments among ten men Five will be silent and doubt Your Testaments Doctrine are is received gets with empty belief consent or 
  mocking politeness It wrangles wriggles through the world mankind and hides under  
  helmets and it is not beloved never loved or believed.— My ^The throat is not safe that speaks these it aloud.— Yet I can take I will take a sprig from of parsley and a budding rose 
  and go through the whole earth; I know I shall You shall see I will not find one heretic to against them.— Can you say as much of ^all the lore of the priesthood? your hieratic lore?   [begin leaf 2 recto]
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