Skip to main content
-
Whitman Archive Title: Europe
-
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00304
-
Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts at the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia
-
Box: 1
-
Folder: 49
-
Date: about 1855
-
Genre: poetry
-
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 16 x 14 cm, handwritten
-
View Images:
1
|
2
-
Content:
The recto notes represent an early stage of lines partially incorporated in "Poem of Salutation," the new
third poem in the 1856 edition of
Leaves of Grass
, which was permanently retitled
"Salut au Monde!" in the
1860 edition. If the note or title "Europe" suggests that Whitman might have first
intended to divide his salutations into discrete sections based on the different
continents, this is a plan he did not follow in the published version(s). The more
polished (but deleted) lines on the verso represent a recasting in poetic form of
several lines from the 1855 Preface. These were further revised for the
1856 "Poem of Many in One,"
after which the first verse drafted on this page (cut off here, and beginning
"over the Texan, Mexican, Florid[ian,]/ Cuban seas...") was dropped. The two
verses below this, however, were preserved relatively unchanged through the poem's
many transformations until the text was essentially fixed under the title "By Blue Ontario's Shore" in
1881.
View All Works
