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What shall the great poet

About This Item

  • Title: What shall the great poet
  • Date: 1850s
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: duk.00303
  • 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 • Editorial note: Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier posits that this manuscript dates to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1560). It may have contributed to a passage in the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass in which Whitman writes that the "swarms of the polished deprecating and reflectors and the polite float off and leave no remembrance" (xii).
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "What shall the great poet." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: duk.00303.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 shall the great poet be then? Shall he be a timid apologetic person, deprecating himself, guarding off the effects he won

  [begin leaf 1 verso]
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