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Locust whirring they come in July

About This Item

  • Title: Locust whirring they come in July
  • Date: About the 1850s or 1860s
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: tex.00467
  • Source: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 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: This manuscript includes two written statements or observations, one about locusts and the other about sunflowers. Although the text is written with the hanging indentation characteristic of Whitman's poetry, it is unclear if these were ever intended as poetic lines. The note about locusts—"Locust whirring they come in July & are loud in August"—is similar to a description of Washington, D.C., in a piece of Civil War journalism titled "Washington in the Hot Season." In this article, published in the New-York Times on August 16, 1863, Whitman writes of the grounds around the U.S. Capitol building in the summertime and notes that there are "locusts whirring." Whether this manuscript directly contributed to this piece of journalism or not, it seems likely that it was composed in the 1850s or 1860s.
  • Related Item(s):
    • On the back of the leaf are draft lines that are not known to have been published in Whitman's lifetime. See tex.00005.
    • See wwa.00083.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Locust whirring they come in July." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 26 April 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: tex.00467.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]
Locust whirring they come in July  
 & are loud in August Sunflower—they bloom bright  
 and large & fresh early  
 in August & through  
 that month into  
 September
  [begin leaf 1 verso]
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