About this Item

Title: Superb and infinitely manifold as

Creator: Walt Whitman

Date: Between 1850 and 1855

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 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his transcription of this manuscript that are taken from Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments (see Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:161).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.