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In the present state of

About This Item

  • Title: In the present state of
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00061
  • 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Editorial note: Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1840s or early 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:160). The manuscript may relate to a self-published review of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass that Whitman wrote for the August 29, 1855, issue of the Brooklyn Daily Times. In the review, titled "Walt Whitman, A Brooklyn Boy," Whitman describes the book's author as "one in whom you will see the singularity which consists in no singularity."
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "In the present state of." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: nyp.00061.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]

In the present state of Nothing is society & literature nothing is more singular than to be without singularity[illegible], and nothing more eccentric than to be entirely sane & without eccentricity

  [begin leaf 1 verso]
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