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Will you have the walls

About This Item

  • Title: Will you have the walls
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00085
  • 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 item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the manuscripts, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was preparing material for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The ideas and language in the last section of the manuscript may relate to the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The first part of this manuscript resembles a line in the fifth poem of that edition, eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric." The leaf looks like it may have been extracted from a notebook.
  • Related Item(s):
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Will you have the walls." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: nyp.00085.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] Will you have the walls [cut away] the world with the air and the fringed clouds The Poet says God and me What do you want from us Ask, and may be we give it you The Soul addresses God as his equal—as one who knows its greatness—as a younger brother   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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