About this Item

Title: identical with the

Creator: Walt Whitman

Date: Before or early in 1855

Whitman Archive ID: duk.00878

Source: Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. 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: This manuscript scrap features prose notes that relate to "I Sing the Body Electric," first published as the fifth poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The first line of the manuscript may relate to information Whitman used to write the article "One of the Lessons Bordering Broadway: The Egyptian Museum," published in Life Illustrated on December 8, 1855. This manuscript is pasted to a larger document along with another scrap that includes information used in that article. Both manuscript scraps were probably written shortly before or early in 1855, though the notes on the backing sheet to which they have been pasted may have been written at a later date.

Related items: This manuscript scrap and the other scrap pasted to the larger backing sheet alongside it originally formed part of a larger notebook. We have made composite images that show the continuation of the text on both paste-ons with text on the notebook leaves from which they were cut, and the manuscripts have been transcribed in separate files. It is possible that the notes about Hercules and Troy on the reverse of this paste-on, which would have been the only vertically oriented text in the notebook, were added after the page was removed from the notebook. See duk.00066, duk.00877, and loc.05589.