Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Literary Manuscripts
  3. Loose Manuscripts
  4. nyp.00029

The power by which the

About This Item

  • Title: The power by which the
  • Date: Before or early in 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00029
  • 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: The imagery of this manuscript is echoed in several other manuscripts, as well as in a line of the opening poem of the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass—the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself" (see "you know how," "I know a rich capitalist," and "the crowds naked in the"). These relationships suggest that this manuscript dates to early in 1855 or before. Edward Grier has observed that "the writing suggests a date in the 1850s" (see Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:136).
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "The power by which the." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: nyp.00029.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]

The power by which the carpenter plumbs his house, is the same power that dashes his brains out if he fall from the roof.—

  [begin leaf 1 verso]
Back to top