Neither the gnat nor the beetles made the final cut, at least within these two verses, while the poke-weed, the elder and the stones sprung up on pages before and after. But the mouse who could stagger a million million infidels remained here it seems in every single draft. These were the earliest extant scribblings of lines that appear in Leaves of Grass, America’s most famous poem by America’s most influential poet.
“Song of Myself,” originally untitled, was Walt Whitman’s propulsive meditation, an extension of who he was as the country’s idealized self. In an undated notebook prior to 1855 the power of nature over art, revealed in the small and the humble and the oft neglected, that Walt Whitman felt was unwavering as evinced in the revisions he made to the work; the mouse was not just able to stagger a handful of non-believers but trillions of them, and in the published poem this tiny creature would go on to astound more than sextillion.
Whitman was, according to scholars, a constant tinkerer of every single word, every single image; he scrambled the lines, “substantively” we’re told, as if they were leaves of grass blown by the wind—so much so that even as Leaves of Grass was being typeset in 1855, he was making last minute changes. Between 1855 and 1881 he revised Leaves of Grass over and over; the Civil War too transformed his thoughts about purpose as a writer and transformed his book, which ultimately resulted in six consecutively thicker editions.
This, his final version, which do you prefer?I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren … And the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels …
 Kenneth Price, Ed Folsom, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work, Wiley, 2005.
Additional sources: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: His Original Edition, with an Introduction by Malcolm Cowley, ed., Penguin, 1976; The Walt Whitman Archive.
(Image: Page 83 of Notebook #80, Library of Congress, reprinted for non-commercial use from the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Fall 2002.)