Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Literary Manuscripts
  3. Loose Manuscripts
  4. upa.00005

Sanity and ensemble characterise

About This Item

  • Title: Sanity and ensemble characterise
  • Date: 1855 or 1856
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: upa.00005
  • Source: Walt Whitman Collection, 1842–1957, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. 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 consists of fourteen lines related to the prose preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The writing probably represents one of Whitman's attempts to reshape material from the preface into poems for the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. Content from the 1855 preface appeared in the 1856 poems "Poem of Perfect Miracles" (later Miracles), "Poem of Many in One" (later "By Blue Ontario's Shore"), and "Poem of the Last Explanation of Prudence" (later "Song of Prudence"). None of these poems, however, bear obvious similarities to the lines in this manuscript.
  • Related Item(s):
    • On the reverse of the leaf is a partial draft, about twenty lines, of "By Blue Ontario's Shore." See upa.00221.
    • See wwa.00153.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Sanity and ensemble characterise." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: upa.00005.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] Sanity and ensemble characterise the great master, Innocence and nakedness are resumed, Theories of the special depart as dreams, Nothing happens, or ever has happened, or ever can 
  happen, but the vital laws are enough, None were or will be hurried—none were or will 
  be retarded; A vast clear scheme—each learner learning it 
  for himself, Taking men, women, laws, the earth, and the 
  things of the earth, as they are, Starting from one'sself, and coming back to one'sself, Looking always toward the poet, . . . looking toward the Seeing all tend eternally toward happiness, What is narrower than gravitation, light, life, of 
  no account, What is less than the sure formation of density, 
  or the patient upheaving of strata, of no account, What is less than that which follows the thief, the 
  liar, the glutton, the drunkard, through this life experience, and doubtless afterward,^—that too of no 
  account.— What does not satisfy all every each one, and convince all— every each one—that 
  too of no account.—   [begin leaf 1 verso]
Back to top