Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Literary Manuscripts
  3. Loose Manuscripts
  4. uva.00292

A City Walk

About This Item

  • Title: A City Walk
  • Date: About 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: uva.00292
  • Source: Papers of Walt Whitman (MSS 3829), Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. 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 may have been an early conception of the poem that was eventually titled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," first published as "Sun-Down Poem" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. The heading of this manuscript reads "A City Walk," which may be suggestive of the tentative title "City of Walks and Joys," the name Whitman originally assigned to "Calamus" 18 in his "Blue Book" revisions of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. This title was changed in the "Blue Book" to "City of orgies, walks and joys" and finally became "City of Orgies" in the 1867 edition. This manuscript was likely written around 1855.
  • Notes written on manuscript: On leaf 1 recto, in unknown hand: "2"; on leaf 1 recto, in unknown hand: "V"
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "A City Walk." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: uva.00292.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]

A City Walk:

2 V Just a list of all that is seen in a walk through the streets of Brooklyn & New York,—and crossing the ferry.   [begin leaf 1 verso]
Back to top