About this Item

Title: Poem of Kisses

Creator: Walt Whitman

Date: Before 1860

Whitman Archive ID: uva.00301

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 manuscripts, see our statement of editorial policy.

Editorial note: The name of the proposed poem, "Poem of Kisses," recalls the title format used in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. Based on the topic and the manuscript's appearance with others of an early date in Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments (1899), Edward Grier speculates that Whitman wrote this before 1860 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1344).