Content:
Early discussions of this notebook dated it in the 1840s, and the date associated with it in the Library of Congress finding aid is 1847. The cover of the notebook features a note calling it the "Earliest and Most Important Notebook of Walt Whitman." A note on leaf 27 recto includes the date April 19, 1847, and the year 1847 is listed again as part of a payment note on leaf 43 recto. More recently, however, scholars have argued that Whitman repurposed this notebook, and that most of the writing was more likely from 1853 to 1854, just before the publication of
Leaves of Grass
. Almost certainly Whitman began the notebook by keeping accounts, producing the figures that are still visible on some of the page stubs, and later returned to it to write the poetry and prose drafts. For further discussion of dating and the fascinating history of this notebook into the twentieth century, see Matt Miller,
Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 2–8. See also Andrew C. Higgins, "Wage Slavery and the Composition of
Leaves of Grass
: The
Talbot Wilson
Notebook,"
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review
20:2 (Fall 2002), 53–77. Scholars have noted a relationship between this notebook and much of the prose and poetry that appeared in the 1855 edition of
Leaves of Grass
. See, for instance, Edward Grier,
Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts
(New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:53–82. The notebook was lost when Grier published his transcription (based on microfilm). The notebook features an early (if not the earliest) example of Whitman using his characteristic long poetic lines, as well as the "generic or cosmic or transcendental 'I'" that appears in
Leaves of Grass
(Grier, 1:55).
Content:
On four leaves, an early version of portions of the poem ultimately titled
"This Compost,"
first printed under the title "Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of The Wheat" in the 1856 edition of
Leaves
of Grass.
On the reverse sides of these leaves is a list of
words regarding the physical body and connected in concept to "I Sing the Body Electric,"
a poem that first appeared as the fourth poem of the 1855
Leaves of Grass.
With this
list, Whitman was gathering material for the noteworthy final section, a
paean to body parts, that he added to the poem in 1856. Glue residue
shows that these leaves were formerly pasted to two other leaves, upon which
is written a prose manuscript fragment regarding California Vigilance
Committees.
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
(New York: New York University Press, 1984. 6 vols.), noted that the
notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Assurances,"
"This Compost," and
an unfinished poem entitled "The Insects. On some of the leaves Whitman has rotated the notebook and written upside down."
