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I say that Democracy

  • Whitman Archive Title: I say that Democracy
  • Whitman Archive ID: loc.05314
  • Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Library of Congress
  • Box: 2
  • Folder: Miscellaneous notes or reminders
  • Series: Notes and Memoranda
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1856
  • Genre: prose
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: 1 | 2
  • Content: The writing at the top of this manuscript bears some resemblance to this sentence from the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass : "Great genius and the people of these states must never be demeaned to romances" (1855, p. ix). The language and topic also resemble those of Whitman's self-authored review of the 1855 Leaves of Grass , "Walt Whitman and His Poems," which was published in The United States Review in September, 1855. It was also one of several reviews printed separately and included in some copies of the 1855 edition. Edward Grier, in Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, notes that "the small writing suggests a date in the 1850s" (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:361.

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