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What we call literature is

About This Item

  • Title: What we call literature is
  • Date: 1850s
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: duk.00295
  • 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: Based on the inclusion of this item with other early manuscripts in Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments (1899), Edward Grier dates it to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1558). The handwriting and the paper also would suggest an early date.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "What we call literature is." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: duk.00295.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]

What we call Literature is but a the blind moist and wobbling cub, new just born and its eyes not open yet in many days.—I am ^You are ana living man, and think; in that alone is a more heightless and fathomless wonder than all the productions of letters and arts in all the years ^nations and periods of this earth.—

  [begin leaf 1 verso]
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