Content:
Whitman likely wrote the building specifications on what is presented here as the last leaf of this notebook first, and then flipped the notebook over and wrote notes from the other direction. References to the
San Francisco
can be dated to sometime after January 1854. The cover of the notebook is labeled "Note Book Walt Whitman" in a hand that is not Whitman's. Selections and subjects from this notebook were used in the 1855 edition of
Leaves of Grass
, including phrases from the poems that would later be titled "Song of Myself" and "Song of the Answerer." See Edward Grier,
Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts
(New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:113–117. Lines in this manuscript correspond to a line from the manuscript poem, unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures": "And now a merry recruiter passes, with fife and drum, seeking who will join his troop." The first several lines of the poem (not including this line) were revised and published in
The American
in October 1880 as "My Picture-Gallery," a poem later included in
Leaves of Grass
as part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster (1881, p. 310).
Whitman Archive Title: [most poets finish single specimens of]
Content:
A group of several notes, all concerned with the general topics of the character and social position of the poet. The sentences pencilled at the top of the page contributed to the poem "Myself and Mine," first published in 1860 as "No. 10" in the "Leaves of Grass" cluster. The list of seven attributes that is written in the middle of the page formed the basis for a stanza of "Poem of The Singers, and of The Words of Poems," published in 1856 and later combined with one of the 1855 poems to become "Song of the Answerer." Pasted to the manuscript is a clipping, annotated and dated June 1856, about Hungarian literary nationalism, and at the bottom of the page are notes on the German poet Heinrich Heine.
