Produce great persons and the producers

Whitman Archive Title: Produce great persons and the producers
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00166
Repository ID: MS 51
Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
Date: 1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten; print
View Images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Content: Manuscript and clipping. On one side of the manuscript leaf (see the first image linked above) are several prose notes, including two versions of a paragraph that was later revised to become a line in "Poem of Many In One," published in Leaves of Grass (1856), and eventually titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore." The phrase "savage and luxuriant," which appears toward the bottom of this side, was used in Whitman's open letter to Emerson, published in an appendix to the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. On the other side of the leaf is a partial draft of "Poem of The Singers, and of the Words of Poems," also first published in 1856. In the final edition of Leaves of Grass this and another poem, which had been included in every edition since 1855, were combined to form "Song of the Answerer." Whitman pasted at least two newspaper clippings on the manuscript, one on each side. However, markings on both sides of the leaf indicate that Whitman potentially pasted a third, unidentified, newspaper clipping on this manuscript. One of these, which had covered Whitman's paragraphs but has since been detached, is included in the file; another is still pasted to the manuscript.