Title: A talent for conversation
Creator: Walt Whitman
Date: Between 1840 and 1870
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00026
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 manuscripts, see our statement of editorial policy.
Editorial note: This manuscript is difficult to date conclusively, but Edward Grier suggests that "this sort of moralizing . . . belongs to [Whitman's] journalizing of the 1840s through the 1860s" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:295).
Contributors to digital file: Kirsten Clawson, Janel Cayer, Kevin McMullen, Nicole Gray, Kenneth M. Price, and Regan Chasek
A talent for conversation—Have you it? If you have, you have a facile and dangerous tenant in your soul's palace.—