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Describing the death of nine

About This Item

  • Title: Describing the death of nine
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00113
  • 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 handwriting and ink of this manuscript are very similar to the handwriting and ink on the back, which features draft lines of the poem that would eventually be titled "Song of Myself." The date of both is therefore likely before or early in 1855.
  • Related Item(s):
    • On the back of this leaf are poetic lines that were used in revised form in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." See nyp.00511.
    • See wwa.00155.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Describing the death of nine." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: nyp.00113.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 verso] Describing the death of nine seven brothers and their parents——who can say that those who were ^least least most lucky who died the earliest, or under the most appaling circumstances? Or that those were luckiest who made the most wealth, and lived the longest stretch of mortality? [cut away] and the known   [begin leaf 1 recto]
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