Content:
A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F.
Grier, in his edition of Whitman's
Notebooks and Unpublished Prose
Manuscripts,
6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 246–280, noted that the
notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the
Broad-Axe,"
"To a Common
Prostitute,"
"You Felons on Trial in
Courts,"
"Starting from
Paumanok,"
"Trickle Drops,"
"I Was Looking for a Long
While,"
"Poem of Joys,"
"Facing West from
California's Shores,"
"To the States,"
"A Song of the Rolling
Earth,"
"On the Beach a Night
Alone,"
"Full of Life Now,"
and "With
Antecedents."
Whitman Archive Title: To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence
Content:
On one composite leaf of pink paper formed of two sections (10 x 13 and 11.5 x 13
cm) of the same page cut apart and pasted together in a new order. The poem number
was originally 101 and then changed to 102; this number was deleted and the
current ?101 added in fine pen. Bowers explains that the poem, in two discrete
verse sections and inscribed in black ink (with title), originally occupied one
full side of this leaf. When Whitman wanted to expand the first section without
having to retranscribe the second one, he simply cut the two sections apart,
flipped the first section over (turning it upside-down in the process), pasted the
second section to the lower edge of the verso of the first section, and wrote his
new first section (beginning "Throwing far, throwing over the head/ of death" and
incorporating the original title as verse 3) in the blank space now created above
the second section. The new first section is written and revised in light ink. As
Bradley and Blodgett observe, the words "thirty-eight years old the/ eighty-first
year of The States" indicate that Whitman composed the poem in 1857; these were
revised to read "I, forty years old the Eighty-third Year of The States" in the
1860
Leaves
, in which this poem
constituted section 45 of "Calamus." In 1867 Whitman retitled the poem "Full of Life, Now."
