Rel ? outset | Whitman Archive

Whitman Archive Title: Rel ? outset
Whitman Archive ID: med.00776
Repository: Catalog of Unlocated Walt Whitman Manuscripts
Date: between 1855 and 1868
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
View Images: currently unavailable
Content: A transcription of this manuscript appeared in Clifton Joseph Furness's Walt Whitman's Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts (Harvard University Press, 1928), 40. Its current location is unknown. The manuscript begins, "First I wish you to realize well that our boasted knowledege, precious and manifold as it is, sinks into niches and corners, before the infinite knowledge of the unknown," a statement reminiscent of the following line from "Poem of the Road" (1856): "All religion, all solid things, arts, governments—all that was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners before the processions of souls along the grand roads of the universe." This poem was eventually retitled "Song of the Open Road." The last part of the manuscript describes, as a metaphor for human attempts to articulate "the spiritual world," a worm "on a twig reaching out in the immense vacancy time and again, trying point after point." This image is one Whitman developed in the poem "A Noiseless Patient Spider," first published in the October 1868 issue of The Broadway, A London Magazine as the third of four numbered poems grouped under the title "Whispers of Heavenly Death."