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Superb and infinitely manifold as

About This Item

  • Title: Superb and infinitely manifold as
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00063
  • 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 in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The discussion of the vastness of time and space is similar to a passage from the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The manuscript includes the phrase "countless octillions of the cubic leagues of space," while a phrase from the version of the poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass reads "a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span" (51). Edward Grier includes two additional sentences in his transcription of this manuscript that are taken from Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments (see Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:161). However, those portions of the manuscript have not been found and there is no evidence that they were ever associated with the text presented here.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Superb and infinitely manifold as." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: nyp.00063.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]

Superb and infinitely manifold t as natural the objects are,—not a so cubic solid each foot ^out of the numberless countless octillions of the cubic leagues of space but has its positive lo ho is being crammed full of positive absolute or direct relative wonders,—not any one of these, nor the whole of them together, disturbs or seems awry to the mind of man or woman.—

  [begin leaf 1 verso]
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