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Hear my fife

About This Item

  • Title: Hear my fife
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1860
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: uva.00565
  • 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: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the 1850s. The lines are versions of a line in a long manuscript poem titled "Pictures," which probably dates to the mid- to late 1850s. Based on the first-person perspective in these draft lines, Emory Holloway has speculated that they likely were written after the line in "Pictures" (Pictures: An Unpublished Poem of Walt Whitman [New York: The June House, 1927], 31). The first several lines of "Pictures" (not including this line) were eventually revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880. The poem was later published in Leaves of Grass as part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster.
  • Related Item(s):
    • Lines on the back of this leaf appeared, in revised form, in the poem eventually titled "The Sleepers." See uva.00260.
    • See wwa.00069.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Hear my fife." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: uva.00565.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] Hear my fife!—I am a recruiter Who Come, who will join my troop?   [begin leaf 2 verso]
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