Understand that you can have

Whitman Archive Title: Understand that you can have
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00138
Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in The Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Repository Title: ["Understand that you can have in your writing..."]
Date: 1855 or 1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Although no specific lines from this manuscript can be directly tied to any of Whitman's published work, the language and ideas are similar to certain sections of the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass , as well as to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself," suggesting that this manuscript may have been written around that time. Wording in this manuscript is also similar to a line in the 1855 poem eventually titled "To Think of Time." A note written by Richard Maurice Bucke, one of Whitman's literary executors, dates the manuscript to 1855 or 1856 ( Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts , ed. Edward F. Grier [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:222).