Beautiful Women

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · By the Roadside · 1860

Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young,
The young are beautiful⁠—but the old are more beautiful than the young.

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, by-the-roadside.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L2.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “Beautiful Women.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1860–61). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/beautiful-women/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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