Outdoors is the best antiseptic

Whitman Archive Title: Outdoors is the best antiseptic

Whitman Archive ID: duk.00297

Repository ID: MS q 32

Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Date: Before or early in 1855

Genre: prose, poetry

Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten

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Content: This prose fragment extols the virtues of outdoor living and the appeal of physical laborers who work outdoors. Similar ideas are found throughout Leaves of Grass . The following lines in the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself" echoes the first two sentences of this manuscript: "I am enamoured of growing outdoors, / Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, / Of the builders and steerers of ships, of the wielders of axes and mauls, of the drivers of horses" (1855, p. 21). The first part of this prose fragment also may relate to the following line from the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass : "The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people" (p. v). The transcription of the manuscript published in Notes and Fragments , ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 152, includes additional text not now present in the manuscript that may also connect it to the following line in the poem eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric": "Do you think they are not there because they are not expressed in parlors and lecture-rooms?" (1855, p. 81). Edward Grier claims that this manuscript was, at one time, pinned together with another manuscript ( Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:169; see duk.00296).