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myself to celebrate

About This Item

  • Title: myself to celebrate
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: duk.00787
  • 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: These manuscript lines are drafts of lines used in the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself," including the poem's famous opening line, "I celebrate myself." In the repository, this manuscript is bound, seemingly by a collector, with a printer's copy of the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass that contains numerous handwritten corrections by Whitman.
  • Related Item(s):
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "myself to celebrate." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: duk.00787.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] [cut away] myself to celebrate [cut away] It is you talking—I am your voice—It was tied in 
  you—In me it begins to be loosened.— talk.— I celebrate myself to celebrate you; every man and woman  
 alive; I transpose my my spirit I pass as live quickly through the ears that hear me; I am loosen the voice tongue that was tied in you them In me It begins to talk out of my mouth I pass quiet I celebrate myself to celebrate you: I am the voice of another man What I I speak The What I speak [illegible] speak I say for of I speak say the same word for every man and woman alive And I say that the soul is not greater than the Body And I say that the Body is not greater than the Soul.   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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