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Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in the Huntington Public Library, Huntington, New York

Original records created by the Huntington Public Library; revised and expanded by the Walt Whitman Archive and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. Encoded Archival Description completed with the assistance of the Gladys Kreible Delmas Foundation, the University of Nebraska Research Council, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.




Individual items at this repository

  • Whitman Archive Title: We know of no beginning in universal literature
  • Whitman Archive ID: hpl.00002
  • Date: about 1856
  • Genre: prose
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: 1
  • Content: Draft of unpublished prose work regarding the beginnings of "universal literature." Pasted to the page is a clipping from an unknown newspaper with the heading "Greeks, Romans, Hebrews." This document has been titled by other collectors "The Dawn of Poetry" (Charles E. Feinberg) and "Beginning of Literature, 1856" (Richard Maurice Bucke). The relationship of this document to Whitman's published work is unknown. An image of the verso is unavailable.

  • Whitman Archive Title: Yet far sweeps your road
  • Whitman Archive ID: hpl.00001
  • Date: 1864
  • Genre: poetry
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: 1 | 2
  • Content: A draft of the poem eventually titled "Thick-Sprinkled Bunting," first published in Drum-Taps in 1865 as "Flag of stars, thick-sprinkled bunting." On the reverse is an undated letter draft to an unknown editor regarding Whitman's ambition to "start a public demand for the general exchange of prisoners of war."

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