To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.
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, inscriptions.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (2)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L3.
Cite this poem
Walt Whitman (1819–1892).
“To the States.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1860–61).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/to-the-states/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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