Walt Whitman Remembers the Ladies

In both poetry and prose Walt Whitman envisions an America in which men and women are seen as equals. In an early draft (1847) of Leaves of Grass he wrote, “I am the poet of women as well as men / The woman is not less than the man.” Those lines did not make it into the first printing (1855), but other comparable lines did. The following passage is found in both the first printing and the 1892 “deathbed” edition: “I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, / And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, / And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.”