Content:
This brief and heavily revised prose manuscript treats an idea that interested Whitman throughout his career, namely, that America requires its own "freer, more muscular" poems rather than "superb chronicles" with "smooth rhymes" imported from Europe. The manuscript, however, bears no clear connections to any specific published work. This manuscript probably dates to the early 1860s, as it appears to have been inscribed after the writing on the reverse side of the leaf (duk.00795), which contains draft lines that contributed to poems first published in the 1860–1861 edition of
Leaves of Grass.
