Content:
This manuscript, a draft of "Others May Praise What They Like," was likely written shortly before the poem's publication in
Drum Taps
(1865). Perhaps because this poem did not treat the war, Whitman moved it from
Drum-Taps
into
Passage to India
, and ultimately into the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster of
Leaves of Grass
. On the back of the leaf is a fragment of an undated draft letter to an unspecified correspondent.
Content:
This note indicates the proper location for the
Drum-Taps
poems in the page sequence of what
was apparently a manuscript or some other pre-publication form of Whitman's
poems. Whitman first used the title
Drum-Taps
for a volume of poems published in 1865. The title was also applied to a cluster of poems within
later editions of
Leaves of
Grass.
