The Walt Whitman Archive
In Whitman's Hand
Manuscripts
About this Item
Title: A man of gigantic
Creator: Walt Whitman
Date: Before or early in 1855
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00293
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: Words and ideas that appear in this manuscript are similar to segments of the 1855 poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." Edward Grier also connects the image of the heroic male and the "flowing grandeur of a man" to the poems that make up the 1855 Leaves (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:178). The date of this manuscript is therefore probably before or early in 1855.
Related item: Another prose manuscript written on the back of this leaf relates to the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass. See duk.00888.
Contributors to digital file: Robert LaCosse, Kirsten Clawson, Janel Cayer, Nicole Gray, Kevin McMullen, and Kenneth M. Price
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Picture of the most flowing grandeur of a man
When a man joined to his great power, and wealth and strength, has the ^ knowledge of the perfect equanimity and
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A man of gigantic, stature, supple, healthy, accomplished, powerful, ^and resistless, is a great man—But when such an one a man with all that is not trapped into any partiality or sh—when he strikes the eternal balance between the eternal average of the developed and the undeveloped—when he isgoes on the square with those who have not yet climbed as high as he—tender to children and old people and women—indulging most the stupid the sinful and the vulgar—because them the world is most down upon—
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