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I say that if once

About This Item

  • Title: I say that if once
  • Date: 1850s
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00101
  • 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 paper and ink, as well as the appearance of a transcription of this manuscript along with transcriptions of other early manuscripts in the "Notes on the Meaning and Intention of 'Leaves of Grass'" section of Notes and Fragments (1899), edited by Richard Maurice Bucke, suggest Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the 1850s. Bucke's transcription concludes with the following words, which do not currently appear on the manuscript: "where they fail of themselves" (55). In The Regenerate Lyric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Elisa New attributes the manuscript to "the period when the first drafts of Leaves of Grass were taking shape" (112). An image of the back of the leaf is not currently available.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "I say that if once." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: nyp.00101.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] I do not expect to dispel the I say that if ^once the conventional distinctions were dis-pelled from our eyes, we should see just as much—by arguing against them—I p assume to take the sweep them away by advancing to a new phase of development [cut away]
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