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there are leading moral truths

About This Item

  • Title: there are leading moral truths
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00019
  • Source: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. 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: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript around 1855. Based on the handwriting and the size of the scrap, Edward Grier dates it to the 1850s, though he also notes that an archival notation on the mounting page next to the manuscript dates it to 1870 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2140). Wording and ideas in the manuscript bear some resemblance to sentences in "Walt Whitman and His Poems," a review Whitman wrote of the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The review was published in The United States Review in September, 1855. It was also part of a series of reviews printed separately and included in some copies of the 1855 edition.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "there are leading moral truths." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: nyp.00019.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] I say that there are certain leading moral truths underlying politics as eternal invariable and reliable and [illegible] as arethe leading truths in geology, chemistry or mathematics.—These truths lie at the are the foundation of American politics:   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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