Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me?

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Calamus · 1860

Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it is so easy to have me become your lover?
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful?
Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?

Where this text comes from

First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1860–61). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the 1860–61 scan. The corpus text follows the 1891–92 arrangement, by which the poem had been revised. First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. [1]

Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.

Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass, calamus.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L9.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me?.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1860–61). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/are-you-the-new-person-drawn-toward-me/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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