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Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Library of Congress

Original finding aid completed by the Library of Congress; 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 Krieble Delmas Foundation, the University of Nebraska Research Council, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.


Title: Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Library of Congress

Collection Number: N/A


Creator:  Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892


Collector:  Harned, Thomas Biggs


Repository:  Manuscripts Division, The Library of Congress

Abstract:
This catalog was created, in part, from digital images of the original manuscripts obtained by The Walt Whitman Archive. The original papers and the finding aid completed by Michael McElderry are held at the Library of Congress.

Scope and Content: 
The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman spans the period 1842-1937, with most of the items dated from 1855-1892. The collection consists of Whitman's correspondence, poetry and prose manuscripts, notes and notebooks, proofs and offprints, printed matter, and miscellaneous supplementary items. A detailed description of the Harned Collection can be found in the Library of Congress publication Walt Whitman: A Catalog (1955), which contains an introductory essay on significant Whitman collectors and their collections and an annotated bibliographic listing of Whitman items then located among the collections of various divisions within the Library.

Walt Whitman's papers were divided among his three literary executors, Richard M. Bucke, Thomas Biggs Harned, and Horace L. Traubel. Of these, only Harned's collection remains largely intact, the integrity of the other collections having been lost through dispersal. Whitman's personal habits were such that he wrote and collected his notes in a casual and unsystematic manner, entrusting his thoughts to scraps of paper, be it the back of a used envelope or the verso of a letter. His notebooks contain an equal number of random jottings, some no more than bits and pieces of paper sewn together to form a small notebook. These notes and notebooks include names and addresses, trial titles, trial lines of poetry and prose pieces, diary and hospital notes, pencil sketches and drawings, drafts of poems and essays, autobiographical and personal notes, printing and publishing notes, and miscellaneous notes on a wide range of subjects such as history, geography, politics, and ethnology.

Poems and prose writings in the Manuscripts series vary in form from tentative outlines to final drafts. This material often shows the extensive revision characteristic of Whitman's composition. Related notes and notebook entries add details helpful for textual analysis of the poems. Whitman's practice of drafting letters, notes, and literary works on the back of incoming letters necessitates the identification of verso items in order to provide full documentation.

James R. Osgood printed the Boston edition of Leaves of Grass (1881-1882), which was withdrawn from publication after being censored by local authorities. Correspondence between Osgood and Whitman about this edition is contained in the collection, as are letters exchanged with T. W. Rolleston concerning German and Russian translations. Other correspondents include Anne Burrows Gilchrist, Thomas Biggs Harned, William Sloane Kennedy, James M. Scovel, J. M. Stoddart, and Benjamin Holt Ticknor.

Whitman had been greatly moved by Abraham Lincoln, who symbolized for him the best in the American national character and who inspired some of his greatest poetry. He lectured extensively on Lincoln, and in a series of lectures given between 1879 and 1890, he recalled details of Lincoln's life and death and sketched an intimate profile based on personal reminiscence. The Lincoln Material series contains a thematic grouping of various types of manuscripts and printed matter concerning these lectures and related topics.

The Proofs and Offprints series includes copies of Whitman's prose and poetry. Whitman often revised his writings after having them set in type, and several of the proofs in this series contain either corrections to the text or notations for the printer.

In 1942, a group of Whitman notebooks from the Harned collection, along with other national treasures, were evacuated from Washington, D.C., for safekeeping during World War II. Upon the return of the material from storage in 1944, it was discovered that ten Whitman notebooks and a cardboard butterfly were missing. In 1995, the Library regained custody of four of these notebooks and the butterfly, but six notebooks remain unaccounted for.

The recovered items relate to Whitman's early career as a journalist and poet and include notes on perception and the senses, names and addresses, diary notes, drafts of Civil War poems, and observations made in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. Whitman also used the notebooks to record the public's reaction to and acceptance of his poetry. The earliest notebook in the collection, written between 1847 and 1854, was among the four recovered and contains drafts of one of Whitman's most famous poems, "Song of Myself." Other notebooks contain notes Whitman made while working as a nurse in Civil War hospitals in Washington, 1862-1864. The cardboard butterfly is thought to be the same Whitman wired on his finger in a photograph that was published as the frontispiece for the 1889 birthday edition of Leaves of Grass.

Only those items deemed poetry and/or prose manuscripts are described in this catalog.

Biographical Information:
Thomas Harned was a prominent lawyer in Camden, New Jersey, where Whitman lived in his final decades. He was a close friend of Whitman's and one of three literary executors named in Whitman's will.

For additional biographical information, see "Walt Whitman," by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, and the chronology of Whitman's Life.

Subjects:
Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892;  Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892--Manuscripts; Poets, American--19th century



Whitman Archive Title: 1st Democracy
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05224
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Undated, on the American Idiom
Date: Between December 1867 and May 1868
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These two leaves used to form part of the same sheet of paper, and form an outline for the three essays—only two of which were actually published as separate articles—that Whitman eventually combined to form the larger work entitled Democratic Vistas. As Whitman has written on the manuscript that the "Democracy" article was "already published," the date of its composition is likely between December 1867 (when "Democracy" appeared in Galaxy) and May 1868 (when Personalism was published). On the reverse of the leaves is a portion of un unpublished prose essay (loc.05620).



Whitman Archive Title: ? for beginning
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05215
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: Undated, on the American idiom
Date: between 1881 and 1885
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A fragmentary prose manuscript written on a leaf created from the reverse sides of an envelope and letter on letterhead from the Eastern Michigan Asylum, dated January 22, 1881. No direct connection to any of Whitman's published works has been established, although the main idea expressed here—that the union of the United States depends upon the English language as a shared legacy— was one that Whitman expressed several times throughout his life, beginning at least with the publication of "America's Mightiest Inheritance" in the April 12 1856 issue of Life Illustrated.



Whitman Archive Title: ? the sky
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06100
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: [1865 or before], war and hospital notes and memoranda
Date: 1863-1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a draft of the section titled "An Afternoon Scene" published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882-1883) and later retained in Complete Prose Works (1892). On the verso is preparatory material for Memoranda During the War, see the entry for loc.01553.



Whitman Archive Title: A Song for Sweet Water
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00361
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: A Song for Sweet Water
Date: July, 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 cm x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes and trial lines for a poem to commemorate "the new water works" entitled "A Song for Sweet Water," subtitled "Pure, general sweet water." A note at the bottom of the document gives the date as July, 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: A large, good-looking woman
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05544
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Date: 1850s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Edward Grier postulates that this manuscript was probably written in the 1850s. The identity of the "large, good-looking woman" and the source of the story about Tom Thumb are unknown, though Grier notes that Whitman interviewed P. T. Barnum in 1847, Thumb visited the Midwest with Barnum's circus after 1851, and Thumb made an 1854 appearance with the circus in Brooklyn. For further details, see Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:244. It is possible that this may have been draft fragments or notes toward intended pieces of fiction.



Whitman Archive Title: A starry midnight
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00083
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: A Clear Midnight
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of a poem entitled "A starry midnight," published as "A Clear Midnight" in 1881. At the top is a note in blue pencil that reads "? for end of poems"



Whitman Archive Title: Abraham Lincoln
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05588
Series: Newspaper Clippings on the Civil War
Box: 4
Folder: Lincoln material, 1865-1868
Date: 1878-1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains what could be a preparatory note for the lecture "Death of Abraham Lincoln" delivered in New York in 1879, in Philadelphia in 1880 and in Boston in 1881. Portions of this lecture had been originally published as "Abraham Lincoln's Death. Walt Whitman's Account of the Scene at Ford's Theatre," in the New York Sun (12 February 1876) and were included in Memoranda During the War (1875-1876). "Abraham Lincoln's Death" was revised and published as "A Poet on the Platform" in the New York Daily Tribune (15 April 1879) and was subsequently reprinted as "Death of Abraham Lincoln" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882-1883) before finally appearing in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Address Book
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02821
Series: Notebooks
Box: 3
Folder: [1866-1877], address books
Date: 1867-1875
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 52 leaves, handwritten, print
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 | 84 | 85 | 86 | 87 | 88 | 89 | 90 | 91 | 92 | 93 | 94 | 95 | 96 | 97 | 98 | 99 | 100 | 101 | 102 | 103 | 104
Content: A disbound notebook, mostly filled with names and addresses. However, the sixty-first surface contains an idea for a poem about "The Storm / all the various things that happen in a storm." It is possible that this is an early conception of the poem that would eventually be titled "Proud Music of the Storm" (originally titled "Proud Musc of the Sea-Storm"). The note mentions being "at sea," as well as "sleeping" and "wak[ing]," all of which are ideas found in "Proud Music." The range of dates in the notebook also falls within the likely period of compositon for that poem, with an earliest recorded date of January 1867 (leaf 18). "Proud Music of the Sea-Storm" was first published in the February 1869 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, but was completed by 30 November 1868, when Whitman sent a copy of the poem to Ralph Waldo Emerson.



Whitman Archive Title: Allude to the Suez
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05312
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1-2
Folder: Miscellaneous notes or reminders
Date: 1869-1871
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a short reminder about alluding to the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal would appear for the first time in Whitman's poetry in "Passage to India", published in the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass, and the reference was retained thereafter.



Whitman Archive Title: America to the Old World Bards
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04599
Series: Notebooks
Box: 3
Folder: Notebook pages
Date: 1870-1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: A manuscript containing poetic lines that eventually led to the poem "Old Chants," first published in the New York publication Truth on 19 March 1891 and was later reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891). "Nat Bloom," the name that appears on the recto of the third leaf, was a New York City acquaintance of Whitman from as late as the 1870s, according to Edward Grier (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984] 4: 1405). If that is true, then this constitutes a very early draft of "Old Chants".



Whitman Archive Title: America! thee formulating
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00621
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: America! Thee formulating
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 13 x 20.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of a poem entitled "America! thee formulating." The lines were incorporated as lines 90 and 91 in the poem "Thy Mother with Thy Equal Brood," first published in 1881. On the verso are lines that appears to be trial titles: "Voices at Early Candle-Light" and "Hurry-Notes."



Whitman Archive Title: And to the soul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05175
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Date: 1855 or earlier
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript containing what appear to be three separate prose entries, of varying length and subject matter. The first briefly discusses the soul, the second discusses paper money and the paying of clergymen and congressmen, and the third discusses horses whose eyesight is supposedly affected by the moon. There is no known connection between any of these fragments and Whitman's published work. Edward Grier notes that the paper matches that of a manuscript dated 1855 or earlier, suggesting a similar date for this manuscript (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:171).



Whitman Archive Title: Autobiographical Data
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05935
Series: Photocopies
Box: 6
Folder: Notebooks [before 1855]
Date: Between 1848 and 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 10 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: Photostats, made for William L. Finkel sometime "prior to 1942," of a notebook then in the collection but lost during World War II. Partial transcriptions, done by Emory Holloway and Clifton Furness in the 1920s, indicate that the photostats, which show sixteen full pages and portions of four others, are an incomplete representation of the original. Neither the photostats nor extant transcriptions bear any definitive evidence for dating the notebook, but scholars have generally agreed that Whitman must have written its contents around the time of the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. Ed Folsom has noted a connection between a passage shown on the right side of the fourth image and the account of the "mash'd fireman" in "Song of Myself." See Folsom, "Erasing Race: The Lost Black Presence in Whitman's Manuscripts," in Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 3–31.



Whitman Archive Title: Brooklyn & Washington Notebook
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04604
Series: Notebooks
Box: 2
Folder: [1860-1864], Brooklyn and Washington notebook
Date: 1860-1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 33 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64
Content: This notebook contains, among other things, miscellaneous notes on soldiers met by Whitman in his visits to the hospitals. The name of soldier Reuben Farwell appears twice (on surface number six and surface number ten) and that of soldier Bethuel Smith appears once (on surface number ten). Whitman mentions these two soldiers in "Typical Soldiers," which first appeared in the "Notes" section of Memoranda During the War (1875–1876), later revised for Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). Notes addressing themes for potential poems appear in this notebook as well (see surfaces 32 through 36). The relationship of these notes to Whitman's published poetry is unknown.



Whitman Archive Title: Burns says
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05247
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: Robert Burns as Poet and Person
Date: 1882-1886
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This prose scrap quotes a March 1792 letter from Robert Burns to George Thompson. In the essay "Robert Burns as Poet and Person," Whitman cites letters to Thompson, particularly letters where Burns discusses his own early love poetry. This scrap is not directly quoted in the essay, but there are allusions to it. The letters are not mentioned in the preliminary publication of the essay, under the title "Robert Burns", which appeared in The Critic (16 December 1882; however, Thompson's letters figure in the essay "Robert Burns as Poet and Person" published in The North American Review 143 (November 1886), 429. This essay was later reprinted in Democratic Vistas and Other Papers (1888) and in November Boughs (1888). The essay was also retained, still within November Boughs, in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: But only pond-babble
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05256
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Only Mulleins and Bumble-bees
Date: 1890-1891
Genre: prose, correspondence
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The notes on the recto are prefatory in nature and reflect the spirit of the preface to Whitman's 1891 Good-Bye My Fancy 2d Annex to Leaves of Grass. The exact phrase, "the mullein and the bumble-bee" is on page 36 of the section entitled "Gathering the Corn" of Good-Bye My Fancy. On the verso is a partial letter from Whitman to unknown friends.



Whitman Archive Title: Crusades
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00066
Series: Lincoln Material
Box: 6
Folder: Lincoln Material Poetry Manuscripts "The Crusades" [1869?]
Date: about 1868-1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript bears trial lines for a poem attempting to link the crusades to America. While other manuscripts and published works share similarities in topic and idea, a direct link to any published document is unknown. The verso contains a cancelled list of references to letters in the House Executive Documents, 38th Cong. which correspond to several individual documents transcribed on the cancelled versos of other crusade manuscripts also in the Harned collection. Other dated materials containing notes on the crusades suggest this manuscript was likely composed around 1869.



Whitman Archive Title: Distinctive and without relation
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05623
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Untitled and Unidentified
Date: 1887
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Much of the language of this note is reproduced in the essay "Five Thousand Poems," first published in The Critic, April 16, 1887, on page 187, and again in November Boughs (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: Dr. L B Russell
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05449
Series: Notebooks
Box: 2-3
Folder: Diary
Date: 1862-1863
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 43 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 | 84 | 85 | 86 | 87
Content: This manuscript notebook contains a series of diary entries from December 1862 to December 1863. In the entries, Whitman keeps track of family correspondence and of how he spent his days. He often mentions visiting wounded and dying soldiers in Washington military hospitals. While the whole notebook adds context to Whitman's writings about the Civil War, there are two entries that can be directly linked to specific passages in Whitman's published work. The entry from Monday, May 4th, 1863 (surface 12) mentions "4th Hooker's battles around Fredericksburg to night the wounded begin to arrive from Hooker's command." This passage contributes to the section "The Wounded from Chancellorsville" published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882-1883) and retained in Complete Prose Works (1892). The entry from Wednesday, September 16th, 1863 (surface number thirty-one), reporting the death of Lorenzo Strong, contributes to "Last of the War Cases" published in November Boughs (1888) and later retained in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Drift Sands
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05999
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: "Drift Sands"
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two draft lines, with the title "Drift Sands." Whitman never published a poem with this title, though this and several other closely related manuscripts seem to constitute working drafts for the couplet "As idly drifting down the ebb, / Such ripples, half-caught voices, echo from the shore," which appears before the final paragraph of "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," first published in November Boughs (1888). Most of "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" was drawn from three previously published pieces ("A Backward Glance on My Own Road [1884]," "How I Made a Book" [1886], and "My Book and I" [1887]). The couplet, however, was not part of any of those earlier essays.



Whitman Archive Title: Drift Sands
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04240
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: "Drift Sands"
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript of two draft lines and title is closely related to several other manuscripts, all of which seem to constitute working drafts for the lines that appear before the final paragraph of "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" as the couplet "As idly drifting down the ebb, / Such ripples, half-caught voices, echo from the shore." First published in November Boughs (1888) "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" was mostly made up of material from three previously published pieces: "A Backward Glance on My Own Road (1884)," "How I Made a Book" (1886), and "My Book and I" (1887). The couplet, however, was not part of any of those earlier essays.



Whitman Archive Title: Drift Sands.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04183
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: "Drift Sands"
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines and phrases under the title "Drift Sands." Whitman never published a poem with this title, though this and several other closely related manuscripts seem to constitute working drafts for the couplet "As idly drifting down the ebb, / Such ripples, half-caught voices, echo from the shore," which appears before the final paragraph of "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," first published in November Boughs (1888). Most of "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" was drawn from three previously published pieces ("A Backward Glance on My Own Road [1884]," "How I Made a Book" [1886], and "My Book and I" [1887]). The couplet, however, was not part of any of those earlier essays. On the reverse side of the manuscript is a letter to Whitman dated June 8, 1885.



Whitman Archive Title: For Note
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01552
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: [1865 or before], war and hospital notes and memoranda
Date: 1863-1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: In this manuscript, entitled "For Note," Whitman seems to be drafting an introductory note for Memoranda During the War, published in 1875-1876. Although the note does not appear verbatim in Memoranda, some passages of this manuscript bear resemblance to the introductory paragraphs in which Whitman reflects on the impossibility of writing a complete and accurate history of the war and offers the rationale for his decision to record a "few glimpses" of "the Hospital part of the drama from '61 to '65."



Whitman Archive Title: For War Memoranda
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01553
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: [1865 or before], war and hospital notes and memoranda
Date: 1863-1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains preparatory material for Memoranda During the War, published in 1875-1876. (Although the note does not appear verbatim in Memoranda, the fact that Whitman titles the manuscript "for war memoranda note," using a different pen, clearly indicates that he thought of using the note for the book.) On the verso is a draft of the section titled "An Afternoon Scene" published in Specimen Days & Collect, see the entry for loc.06100.



Whitman Archive Title: For an idea
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00070
Series: Lincoln Material
Box: 6
Folder: Lincoln Material Poetry Manuscripts "The Crusades" [1869?]
Date: about 1868-1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: One of several manuscripts in which Whitman records and develops ideas for a poem that never emerged about the crusades. In this manuscript, Whitman relates "the Crusades" and "our own great war" through the observation that great revolutions have "been mainly for an idea." Whitman mentions the crusades specifically in both his prose works Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and Democratic Vistas (1871), though a direct link between these manuscript notes and any of his published works is unclear. The verso contains part of a cancelled letter about the steamer Georgia between Charles Francis Adams, Minister to England during the Civil War, and Earl Russell, British Foreign Minister. Other dated materials containing notes on the crusades suggest this manuscript was likely composed around 1869.



Whitman Archive Title: For funeral piece
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07041
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Abraham Lincoln
Date: 1865
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript, significantly titled "For Funeral piece A.L." ("For Funeral piece A.L."), is composed of a short note which can be read as a general outline of the poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," followed by some lines of poetry that bear resemblance with section eleven of the same poem. The poem was initially published in Sequel to Drum Taps, issued by Gibson Brothers in the fall of 1865 and bound with Drum Taps. The poem made its first appearance in the text of Leaves of Grass in 1867.



Whitman Archive Title: For remember that behind all
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05334
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Date: Between 1845 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Edward Grier notes that this scrap contains ideas similar to those found in what would become section 4 of the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." But Grier also indicates that the manuscript could be notes for a lecture that Whitman was planning (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2047). In either case, the manuscript likely dates to the 1850s.



Whitman Archive Title: For us two, reader dear
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00362
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: For us Two, Reader Dear
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry, correspondence
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 22.5 cm x 17.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of the poem "For Us Two, Reader Dear," first published in 1891. Also on the leaf is a letter to Whitman dated June 4, 1890 from Mrs. Noble T. Biddle.



Whitman Archive Title: Germany, or even Europe
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05316
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Miscellaneous notes or reminders
Date: 1890-1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript led to a passage published in "Have We a National Literature," (North American Review, 152, March 1891), and in Good-bye My Fancy 2nd Annex to Leaves of Grass (1891), in the section entitled "American National Literature."



Whitman Archive Title: Go into the subject
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05620
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Undated, on the American Idiom; Untitled and Unidentified
Date: Between 1867 and 1885
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: The rectos of these several leaves form what seems to be a piece of journalism or an essay about words, language, and names. No known publication of the piece has been found, but it is possible that it is related to Whitman's 1885 essay "Slang in America." At one point in the planning of that essay Whitman considered splitting the material he had been collecting into two articles, to be called "Words, words, words" and "Names & Slang in America" (see Edward Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 5:1674). At the top of this manuscript Whitman has written the heading "words," as well as the title "About Names," making it unclear which, if either, of the two articles this may have been intended for. What's more, the language, tone, and content of this manuscript are nothing like those of "Slang in America," so any connection between the two is oblique. The text on the recto of the second leaf shown here (image 3) was likely intended to come either between leaves one and three, or be inserted as the opening lines of the essay. Leaves one and three used to form part of the same sheet of paper, and on the verso is another, unrelated scrap of prose (loc.05619). Leaves four and five also used to form part of the same sheet of paper (loc.05224), and on the verso is an outline for the three essays, only two of which were actually published as separate articles, that Whitman eventually combined to form the larger work entitled Democratic Vistas. As Whitman has written on the manuscript that the "Democracy" article was "already published," the date of the Democratic Vistas plan was likely written between December 1867 (when "Democracy" appeared in Galaxy) and May 1868 (when Personalism was published). This means that the essay about names and language on the rectos was written after that date. A line on the recto of the third leaf (image 5) contains the phrase "commonest & cheapest & nearest," which had first appeared in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass , in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself". This is one of only a few known examples of Whitman recycling lines of poetry in later prose.



Whitman Archive Title: Gossip at Dusk
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00367
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Gossip at Dusk
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, 4 x 14 to 20 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts of lines entitled "Gossip at Dusk." The relationship to Whitman's published work is unknown.



Whitman Archive Title: Grand is the seen
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00363
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Grand is the Seen
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry, correspondence
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12.5 cm x 20.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of the poem "Grand is the Seen," first published in 1891. On the verso is the end of a letter from R. Rooke Morgau.



Whitman Archive Title: Henry VII died 1509
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05548
Series: Notebooks
Box: 3
Folder: Undated
Date: 1855-1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: The brutality of the reign of Henry VIII and the English Reformation is evident in the section of Specimen Days and Collect (1882-1883) entitled "Origins of Attempted Secession."



Whitman Archive Title: Hospital notebook
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05356
Series: Notebooks
Box: 3
Folder: Washington & Brooklyn hospital notebook
Date: 1863-1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 49 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 | 84 | 85 | 86 | 87 | 88 | 89 | 90 | 91 | 92 | 93 | 94 | 95 | 96 | 97 | 98
Content: A handmade notebook (now disbound) containing mostly names and addresses of soldiers and brief accounts of the hospital camps and battlefields. Two of the soldiers' names, Rueben Farwell and Bethuel Smith, appear in "Typical Soldiers," a section of Specimen Days (1882-1883). The piece was reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: How Would it Do
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05173
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: Undated, on the American Idiom
Date: 1880-1885
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a draft with trial titles and general ideas for the essay "Slang in America," published in the North American Review (November 1885). The piece was later reprinted in November Boughs (1888) and was retained in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: I say that Democracy
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05314
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Miscellaneous notes or reminders
Date: Between 1850 and 1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The writing at the top of this manuscript bears some resemblance to this sentence from the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass: "Great genius and the people of these states must never be demeaned to romances" (1855, p. ix). The language and topic also resemble those of Whitman's self-authored review of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, "Walt Whitman and His Poems," which was published in The United States Review in September, 1855. It was also one of several reviews printed separately and included in some copies of the 1855 edition. Edward Grier, in Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, notes that "the small writing suggests a date in the 1850s" (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:361.



Whitman Archive Title: In Nature all is so real
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05333
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Date: 1850s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript that contrasts the perfection of nature with the imperfection of "religions" and "creeds." There is no known connection between the manuscript and Whitman's published work. Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2044).



Whitman Archive Title: In mem. of A.L.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07040
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Abraham Lincoln
Date: 1865
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The notes contained in this manuscript, significantly titled "In Mem. of A.L." ("In Memory of Abraham Lincoln") are focused on the sense of collective grieving for the death of Lincoln, a founding theme for the poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," initially published in Sequel to Drum Taps, issued by Gibson Brothers in the fall of 1865 and bound with Drum Taps. The poem made its first appearance in the text of Leaves of Grass in 1867.



Whitman Archive Title: In view of that progress
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05321
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: on religion
Date: 1884-1887
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This scrap is a draft of Whitman's essay "Five Thousand Poems," first published in The Critic, number 172, April 16, 1887. It was later reprinted in Democratic Vistas and Other Papers (London, 1888), and November Boughs (1888). The language on this leaf appears nearly verbatim in "Five Thousand Poems." On the verso is a partial letter to Whitman from the office of The Critic.



Whitman Archive Title: July 30 1865
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02818
Series: Notebooks
Box: 3
Folder: Notebook pages [1865]
Date: 30 July 1865
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Two manuscript leaves containing notes from Whitman's Civil War hospital visits. These particular notes would later be included in "Army Hospitals and Cases: Memoranda at the Time, 1863-66," published in Century Magazine in October 1888. The piece would later be revised and included in November Boughs as "Last of the War Cases."



Whitman Archive Title: L. of G.'s Purport
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00364
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: L.of G.'s Purport
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of the first two lines of "L. of G.'s Purport," first published in 1891.



Whitman Archive Title: Leave-taking Words
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00078
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
Date: 1870–1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 23.5 x 13.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The page appears to be a draft of a title page for a manuscript titled "Leave-taking Words" or "Last Ripples (A Prelude to Passage to India)." At the bottom of the page are four lines from the end of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," first published as "A Child's Reminiscence" in 1859. The lines from the poem are cleanly written, suggesting that they were meant to serve as an epigraph for Whitman's manuscript. "Passage to India" was published first in 1871. On the verso is a draft of a stanza of "Eidólons," first published in 1876. The verso also contains prose comments on the war, of which the connection to Whitman's published works is unknown.



Whitman Archive Title: Life light and
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04601
Series: Notebooks
Box: 3
Folder: Notebook pages
Date: 1860-1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript that contains various poetic lines. The line on the second leaf that describes "the Steamship . . . and the trailing pennant of smoke" was incorporated, in a slightly altered form, into the 1867 version of the poem that would eventually be titled "Song of Myself." The line was retained in all subsequent versions of the poem. The connection of the rest of the lines to Whitman's published work is unknown. The versos of both leaves are currently unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Lincoln Dont fail to note
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07042
Series: Lincoln Material
Box: 6
Folder: "Death of Abraham Lincoln," notes and early drafts, [1875]
Date: 1876-1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Handwritten notes about Abraham Lincoln, most likely intended for use in Whitman's lecture, "Death of Abraham Lincoln." The page numbers refer to Samuel Penniman Bates' book, The Battle of Gettysburg (Philadelphia: T.H. Davis & Co., 1875). Bates had quoted a letter from Lincoln to General Joseph Hooker, making note of Lincoln's characteristic "homely but pointed similes" (13–14). Whitman also notes pages reproducing the Gettysburgh Address, as well as Edward Everett's remark to Lincoln about the power of his twenty lines (213–15). Whitman delivered his lecture about Lincoln in New York in 1879 and would deliver it at least eight other times over the succeeding years. Whitman would later publish a version of the lecture as "Death of Abraham Lincoln" in Specimen Days (1882–1883), which was retained in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: List of serviceable
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05211
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: Undated, on the American idiom
Date: 1850-1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a short "list of serviceable words from the French" (there are only two words listed: "surveillance" and "prestige").



Whitman Archive Title: Lucretius. De Rerum Natura
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05547
Series: Notebooks
Box: 3
Folder: Lucretius
Date: 1866-1871
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: These notes, based on a reading of Rev. John Selby Watson's 1851 translation Lucretius on the Nature of Things, contributed to a short passage on the Roman poet Lucretius in Democratic Vistas (1871), which was reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Maize-Tassels
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00368
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Maize-Tassels
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14.5 x 13.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of a poem entitled "Maize-Tassels." Written at the top of the manuscript is the note, "White Horse notes." The relationship of this manuscript to Whitman's published work is unknown.



Whitman Archive Title: Make a conclusion
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01554
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: [1865 or before], war and hospital notes and memoranda
Date: 1863-1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a short note with two war scenes (the homeward bound Armies at Washington and the disbanding, and the first onset and alarm) that Whitman hypothesized to use as a conclusion and an opening for Memoranda During the War (1875-1876). The scenes did not appear in these locations, but were used, still in Memoranda, in the section titled "The Ensuing Three Months—The National Uprising and Volunteering." The scenes were also included within "National Uprising and Volunteering" published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882-1883) and later retained in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Miscellaneous Notes
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00622
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Undated, Miscellaneous notes or reminders
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes Whitman took concerning ideas or suggestions for poems and other work (for example, "Mr. Goodfellow's suggestions for a pastoral poem"). These notes have no known relationship to Whitman's published work.



Whitman Archive Title: N.W. Texas, Utah, New Mexico
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05339
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: On the Western United States
Date: 1879-1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This scrap is alluded to in the section of Specimen Days & Collect (1882-1883) entitled "Steam-Power, Telegraphs, & America's Back-Bone." It was probably composed after September 1879, when Whitman traveled out to Denver, CO. On the verso is a page from an elections inspector's book from the 1850s.



Whitman Archive Title: Names or terms
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05640
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Date: 1850s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript in which Whitman discusses false meanings being applied to words, "as the term calling the American aborigines Indians." Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 5:1664).



Whitman Archive Title: New American pictures
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05341
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: On the Western United States
Date: 1879–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These notes about mountain ranges of the American West might have contributed to "America's Back-Bone," which appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882-1883). This manuscript was probably created after September 1879, when Whitman traveled to Denver, CO. The verso is a tax bill for someone else dated 1854. Edward Grier and Fredson Bowers theorize that Whitman came upon a large collection of obsolete forms when he started as an editor at the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1857. He used the forms as notepaper for many years.



Whitman Archive Title: New Mexico Religion Catholic
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05342
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: On the Western United States
Date: 1883
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A lot of the language of this scrap is taken from page 1238 of Harper's Statistical Gazetteer (1855). In 1883, Whitman was asked to compose a poem for the 333rd anniversary of the founding of Santa Fe, NM. He responded with a letter that was published in the Philadelphia Press August 5, 1883. It was reprinted in the section of November Boughs (1888), entitled "The Spanish Element in Our Nationality."



Whitman Archive Title: Note A * While
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07036
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Untitled and unidentified
Date: 1880-1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The passage in this manuscript appears in the section "Five Thousand Poems" of November Boughs, published in 1888 (retained within November Boughs in Complete Prose Works [1892]).



Whitman Archive Title: Note Book
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04605
Series: Notebooks
Box: 2
Folder: [1860], Boston notebook
Date: 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 34 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56
Content: A notebook from Whitman's trip to Boston in March through May of 1860. While most of the notebook is devoted to names, addresses, and notes from his visit, the first two leaves (surfaces 3 and 4) contain notes related to the printing of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, which he was in Boston to oversee. The printing notes refer to possible ornamentations for specific pages of Leaves and reference other books as examples of possible ornamentation and typography. Edward Grier provides information about the specific books that Whitman mentions, noting similarities between them and Leaves (Notebook and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984] 1:419-421). Images of blank versos for several of the pages are currently unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Note Book Walt Whitman 1333
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05549
Series: Notebooks
Box: 3
Folder: Camden notebook 1885?
Date: about 1885
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 24 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48
Content: A late notebook with notes for poem ideas, trial titles, addresses, quotations, and other material, some of which is not in Whitman's hand (see surfaces 13, 29, 36 and 38). A few of the entries contributed to published pieces of poetry. Surfaces 21 and 24 include trial titles for "Fancies at Navesink," first published in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), and reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888). Surface 32 includes a note to "write a poem . . . to be call'd Yonnondio." Whitman first published a poem under this title in the Critic (26 November 1887). The poem was reprinted in "Sands at Seventy," an annex to the 1888 edition of Leaves of Grass, and was retained in the 1892 edition. Surface 40 contains, among other notes, a cancelled line reading "yet my soul-dearest leaves—the hardest and the last," which appeared, nearly verbatim, as the closing line of "You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," first published along with three other poems in Lippincott's Magazine (November 1887) under the general title, "November Boughs." These four poems were reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: Notebook Walt Whitman
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05080
Series: Notebooks
Box: 2-3
Folder: New York City notebook
Date: 1857-1861
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 22 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44
Content: Two surfaces (number 27 and 29) of this manuscript notebook contain notes on the Old Military Garden in New York City that Whitman used for the article "An Old Brooklyn Landmark Going," published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on 10 October 1861, page 2. For the full transcription and images of the article, see http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/periodical/journalism/tei/per.00207.html



Whitman Archive Title: Notebook Walt Whitman
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00348
Series: Notebooks
Box: 2-3
Folder: New York City notebook
Date: 1857-1862
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 32 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64
Content: This notebook includes a draft of lines written about Pfaff's, a popular mid-nineteenth century Bohemian spot (see surfaces 11 through 18). The lines were edited and published posthumously as "The Two Vaults." This notebook also contains the notes (see surfaces 23 to 44 and 47 to 59) about the Jamaica Presbyterian bicentennial which were used by Whitman in the article "Important Ecclesiastical Gathering at Jamaica, L.I." published in the Brooklyn City News in January 1862.



Whitman Archive Title: Notebook, 1868-1870
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00350
Series: Lincoln Material
Box: 6
Folder: Notebook, 1868-1870
Date: about 1868-1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 8 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16
Content: A notebook (probably bound by someone other than Whitman), containing some draft lines (one titled "Epictetus," another "After an Extract from Heine's Diary") that bear an unknown relationship to Whitman's published work. Also included are several notes that scholars have identified as autobiographical comments on Whitman's relationship with Peter Doyle.



Whitman Archive Title: Notebook, 1860-1861
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00029
Series: Notebooks
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks, 1860-1861
Date: 1860-1861
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 61 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 | 84 | 85 | 86 | 87 | 88 | 89 | 90 | 91 | 92 | 93 | 94 | 95 | 96 | 97 | 98 | 99 | 100 | 101 | 102 | 103 | 104 | 105 | 106 | 107 | 108 | 109 | 110 | 111 | 112 | 113 | 114 | 115 | 116 | 117 | 118
Content: An early notebook with several notes for poem ideas, trial lines, addresses, and drawings. Material in this notebook relates to poems ultimately titled "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "The City Dead-House," and "Chanting the Square Deific." Some of the trial verses in this notebook were published posthumously as "[I Stand and Look]," "Ship of Libertad," and "Of My Poems." Within the notebook is also a poem draft that Whitman has titled called "The Incomplete."



Whitman Archive Title: Notes and Flanges.—No. 1.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04235
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: "Drift Sands"
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript scrap containing two trial titles and two poetic lines, with corrections. Although Whitman never published a poem with either of these titles, this and several other closely related manuscripts seem to constitute working drafts for the couplet "As idly drifting down the ebb, / Such ripples, half-caught voices, echo from the shore," which appears before the final paragraph of "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," first published in November Boughs (1888). Most of "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" was drawn from three previously published pieces ("A Backward Glance on My Own Road [1884]," "How I Made a Book" [1886], and "My Book and I" [1887]). The couplet, however, was not part of any of those earlier essays.



Whitman Archive Title: Old Chants
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04598
Series: Lincoln Material
Box: 6
Folder: Poetry Manuscript, Old Chants
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of the first five lines of the poem "Old Chants," first published in 1891. The draft shows that Whitman also considered the titles "An Ancient Ballad Reciting" and "An Ancient Song Reciting." The verso is blank.



Whitman Archive Title: On the Religion
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05323
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: on religion
Date: 1870-1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The spirit of this note made it into the "Lingering Note" at the end of Whitman's essay "Elias Hicks, Notes (such as they are)" in November Boughs (1888). Apparently, Whitman intended to write a longer essay which did not allude to Hicks. Grier dates this scrap from the 1870s because of the steadiness of the handwriting (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press], 6, 2101).



Whitman Archive Title: Out of A Hundred Years
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00079
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
Date: after 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A scrap of paper with an underlined title written across the top reading "Out of A Hundred Years" and subtitled "in Prose and Verse Melanged." In the top margin is written "?Vistas."



Whitman Archive Title: Poem incarnating the mind
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00346
Series: Notebooks
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks, Before 1855
Date: Before 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28
Content: Edward Grier dates this notebook before 1855, based on the pronoun revisions from third person to first person and the notebook's similarity to Whitman's early Talbot Wilson notebook (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:102). Grier notes that a portion of this notebook (beginning "How spied the captain and sailors") describes the wreck of the ship San Francisco in January 1854 (1:108 n33). A note on one of the last pages of the notebook (surface 26) matches the plot of the first of four tales Whitman published as "Some Fact-Romances" in The Aristidean in 1845, so segments of the notebook may have been written as early as the 1840s. Lines from the notebook were used in "Song of Myself" and "A Song of the Rolling Earth," which appeared in the 1856 Leaves of Grass. Language and ideas from the notebook also appear to have contributed to other poems and prose, including "Miracles;" the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass; "The Sleepers," which first appeared as the fourth poem in the 1855 Leaves; and "A Song of Joys," which appeared as "Poem of Joys" in the 1860 edition.



Whitman Archive Title: Roundly considered
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05621
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Untitled and Unidentified
Date: 1880-1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Much of the language of this note is reproduced in the essay "Five Thousand Poems," first published in The Critic, April 16, 1887, on page 187, and again in November Boughs (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: See page 81
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05320
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Miscellaneous notes or reminders
Date: 1884-1885
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This scrap refers to pages from Asia Booth Clarke's The Elder and the Younger Booth (1882), according to Grier (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press], 3, 1194). Although there is no mention of Junius Brutus Booth's vegetarianism on page 84, as Whitman indicates, the phrase "strict vegetarian" appears in Whitman's article "Booth and 'The Bowery,'" first published in the New York Tribune (16 August 1885, page 4), and then in the essay "The Old Bowery" November Boughs (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: Sketch over rapidly
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02823
Series: Lincoln Material
Box: 6
Folder: "Death of Abraham Lincoln," notes and early drafts, [1875]
Date: 1878-1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Handwritten notes about a lecture on Abraham Lincoln, most likely "Death of Abraham Lincoln". These appear to be fairly early notes about the general structure of the talk, rather than an actual draft. Whitman first delivered this lecture in New York in 1879 and would deliver it at least eight other times over the succeedings years, delivering it for the last time on April 15, 1890. Whitman would later publish a version of the lecture as "Death of Abraham Lincoln" in Specimen Days (1882–1883), which was retained in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Sparse, wintry little leaves
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00359
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 23.5 cm x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of a poem entitled "Sparse, wintry, little leaves." The poem was later revised and published as "You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me" in 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: Summer Rivulets
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05635
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Trial titles
Date: 1875-1881
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: In this manuscript Whitman mentions a plan to write a "piece strongly recognizing the affiliations" of his poems. In a centered column, there are three possible titles for such a piece, and one of them is "By the road-sides," which is resonant with the title Whitman would give to the cluster "By the Roadside" first in the 1881-1882 edition and then in the 1891-1892edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Supplement Hours
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00518
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Supplement Hours
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 cm x 15.5 cm to 21 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts and trial lines of the poem "Supplement Hours," first published posthumously in 1897.



Whitman Archive Title: Supplement Hours
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00519
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Supplement Hours
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 cm x 15.5 cm to 21 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts and trial lines of the poem "Supplement Hours," first published posthumously in 1897.



Whitman Archive Title: Supplement Hours
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00520
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Supplement Hours
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 cm x 15.5 cm to 21 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts and trial lines of the poem "Supplement Hours," first published posthumously in 1897.



Whitman Archive Title: Supplement Hours
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00527
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Supplement Hours
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 cm x 15.5 cm to 21 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts and trial lines of the poem "Supplement Hours," first published posthumously in 1897.



Whitman Archive Title: Talbot Wilson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00141
Series: Notebooks
Box: 8
Folder: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, Notebooks, [1847], (80)
Date: Between 1847 and 1854
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 66 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 | 84 | 85 | 86 | 87 | 88 | 89 | 90 | 91 | 92 | 93 | 94 | 95 | 96 | 97 | 98 | 99 | 100 | 101 | 102 | 103 | 104 | 105 | 106 | 107 | 108 | 109 | 110 | 111 | 112 | 113 | 114 | 115 | 116 | 117 | 118 | 119 | 120 | 121 | 122 | 123 | 124 | 125 | 126 | 127 | 128 | 129 | 130 | 131 | 132 | 133
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).



Whitman Archive Title: That there should be
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05650
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: [Before 1890?], on the nature of poetry
Date: 1875-1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contributed to the last part of the section "Five Thousand Poems" in November Boughs published in 1888 (retained within November Boughs in Complete Prose Works [1892]).



Whitman Archive Title: The appearance
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05302
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Spectacle Inside the Opera House
Date: 1890-1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: This item appears to be a fragmentary, earlier draft of "A Visit to the Opera," a manuscript article now at Huntington Library in San Marino, California. No published version of the article has been found, though both manuscripts bear some similarities with a piece that Whitman published in Life Illustrated on November 10, 1855, entitled "The Opera." Edward Grier, in his discussion of these and other related manuscripts, speculates that the manuscripts represent a revision of the published article, which Whitman perhaps submitted for publication sometime after late 1858. (See Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984] 1:388-397.)



Whitman Archive Title: The Amadis of Gaul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05546
Series: Notebooks
Box: 3
Folder: Undated
Date: 1855-1871
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 11 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22
Content: These notes served as background for Whitman's discussion of current popular American literature in Democratic Vistas (1871), where he speculates that it is an inheritance of "the Amadises and Palmerins."



Whitman Archive Title: The analogy
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05176
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Date: 1855 or earlier
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript that discusses, in gendered terms, the relationship between the soul and "physical matter," describing the former as male and the latter as female. Although Whitman frequently addresses issues relating to the soul in his poems, there is no direct conncetion between the manuscript and Whitman's published work. Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to 1855 or earlier (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:176).



Whitman Archive Title: The idea of reconciliation
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05180
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: [Before 1882], "The Tramp and Strike Questions"
Date: Between 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A version of the second paragraph of this manuscript appears toward the end of the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass>: "No great literature nor any like style of behaviour or oratory or social intercourse or household arrangements or public institutions or the treatment by bosses of employed people, nor executive detail or detail of the army or navy, nor spirit of legislation or courts or police or tuition or architecture or songs or amusements or the costumes of young men, can long elude the jealous and passionate instinct of American standards" (xii). Edward Grier dates the manuscript after 1857 because it is written on the reverse of a City of Williamsburgh tax form (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:400). Scholars, following Fredson Bowers, have generally assumed that Whitman used the Williamsburgh tax forms from 1857 to 1860, while he was working at the Brooklyn Daily Times. The city of Williamsburgh was incorporated with Brooklyn effective January 1855, so the forms would have been obsolete after that date (Whitman's Manuscripts: Leaves of Grass [1860] [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955], xli–xliii). Most of the manuscripts Whitman wrote on the tax forms can be dated to the late 1850s. Bowers also notes, however, that Whitman may have used the forms over a considerable span of time, and that "it is not impossible that Whitman had picked up these tax forms for scrap paper at Rome Brothers at some unknown date in 1854 or early 1855, or later" (xliii). At least two of the tax forms Whitman used were dated 1854 (see, for instance, "Vast national tracts"), but as Grier points out, this may not correspond to the date of Whitman's writing (5:1946). Whitman may have found a stack of obsolete Williamsburgh forms in 1857 that included discarded draft forms dated earlier. Although this manuscript matches wording in the preface to the 1855 edition, Whitman copied out sections of the preface in several later manuscripts, and the revision from "much longer" to "permanently" suggests that here Whitman may have been revising away from the preface version here as well. The manuscript is thus difficult to date conclusively, but it was almost certainly written after 1854 and probably before 1860.



Whitman Archive Title: The incident of the blowing up
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05317
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Miscellaneous notes or reminders
Date: 1862
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This scrap contains a passage that is referenced in Whitman's column "Brooklyniana" published in the Brooklyn Standard on February 8, 1862. The column is reproduced here.



Whitman Archive Title: The regular old followers
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00024
Series: Notebooks
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks c. 1854–1855
Date: Between 1853 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 12 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24
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: The wreck of the "Mexico"
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05318
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Miscellaneous notes or reminders
Date: 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This scrap refers to the 1836 wreck of the Mexico. Whitman writes about this in the passage "Paumanok, and My Life on It as a Child and a Young Man," published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882-1883). According to Grier, the wrecks of the Mexico and the Bristol are also alluded to in "The Sleepers," section 4. The scrap dates from December 1882, Grier says, because the address on the verso is that of Robert Pearsall Smith, whom Whitman met then (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier [New York: New York University Press, 1984] 3: 1186).



Whitman Archive Title: This Journey
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00365
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: L. of G.'s Purport
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft entitled "This Journey" (the manuscript suggests Whitman was also considering the title "My Task"), later incorporated as lines 6, 7, 8, and 9 in "L. of G.'s Purport," first published in 1891. Also on the leaf is an undated, cancelled letter.



Whitman Archive Title: This journey
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00366
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: L. of G.'s Purport
Date: about 1871–1874 and about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two drafts of a poem entitled "This journey." The lines were later incorporated as lines 6, 7, 8, and 9 in "L. of G.'s Purport," first published in 1891. On the verso are notes about "Payments to Mrs. White" between 1871 and 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: This western two-thirds
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05340
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: On the Western United States
Date: 1879-1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This scrap is alluded to in the section of Specimen Days & Collect (1882-1883) entitled "The Prairies and Great Plains in Poetry." It was probably composed after September 1879, when Whitman traveled out to Denver, CO. On the verso is a page from an elections inspector's book from the 1850s.



Whitman Archive Title: Thou Orb Aloft
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00084
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 11 cm x 19 cm to 23 cm x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A two-page draft of the poem published first in 1881 as "A Summer Invocation," then published later that year with the title "Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling."



Whitman Archive Title: Though the spare hours
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05263
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: Robert Burns as Poet and Person
Date: 1884-1888
Genre: prose, correspondence
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: According to Grier, this scrap was found in an envelope with numerous newspaper clippings about Robert Burns dating from March 25, 1836 to August 9, 1890 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press], 3, 1140). The notes were apparently intended for a revision to the essay "Robert Burns as Poet and Person," which appeared under the title "Robert Burns" in The Critic (16 December 1882), and as "Robert Burns as Poet and Person" in The North American Review (November 1886). This essay was later reprinted in Democratic Vistas and Other Papers (1888) and in November Boughs (1888). The essay was also retained, still within November Boughs, in Complete Prose Works (1892). The letter on the verso is dated June 10, 1884.



Whitman Archive Title: To the Year 1889
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04597
Series: Proofs and Offprints
Box: 6
Folder: To the Year 1889
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A proof of the poem "To the Year 1889," first published in 1889, with a note in Whitman's hand about its publication in the Critic. The poem was later published as "To the Pending Year."



Whitman Archive Title: Tramps & Strikes
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05251
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: The Tramp and Strike Questions
Date: 1879-1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This prose scrap, titled "Tramps & Strikes," varies in its wording from the undelivered address "The Tramp and Strike Question." Nonetheless, it reflects themes present in the address eventually published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883).



Whitman Archive Title: Two or three memories
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05304
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Notes and Memories
Date: December 13, 1883
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This item refers to the Italian tenor Giovanni Matteo Mario's death on December 11,1883. Whitman referred to Mario in Specimen Days & Collect, published in 1882-1883, in the passages entitled "Plays and Operas too"An earlier version of the essay appeared in "The Old Bowery," and "Old Actors, Singers, Shows, etc., in New York."



Whitman Archive Title: Vast national tracts
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05354
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Date: Between 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: The first manuscript leaf is written on the back of a City of Williamsburgh tax form, filled out and dated 1854. The second leaf is written on the back of a Brooklyn election form, which includes the printed digits "185" but has not been filled out with the specific year. Scholars, following Fredson Bowers, have generally assumed that Whitman used the Williamsburgh tax forms from 1857 to 1860, while he was working at the Brooklyn Daily Times. The city of Williamsburgh was incorporated with Brooklyn effective January 1855, so the forms would have been obsolete after that date (Whitman's Manuscripts: Leaves of Grass [1860] [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955], xli–xliii). Most of the manuscripts Whitman wrote on the tax forms can be dated to the late 1850s. Bowers also notes, however, that Whitman may have used the forms over a considerable span of time, and that "it is not impossible that Whitman had picked up these tax forms for scrap paper at Rome Brothers at some unknown date in 1854 or early 1855, or later" (xliii). As Edward Grier points out, the date on the tax forms may not correspond to the date of Whitman's writing (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 5:1946). Whitman may have found a stack of obsolete Williamsburgh forms in 1857 that included discarded draft forms dated earlier. Whitman saw something of the plains on his journey to and from New Orleans in 1848, and his most extensive trip through the west was to Denver in 1879, but he collected newspaper articles about the west throughout the 1850s, 60s, and 70s (Ed Folsom, "Walt Whitman and the Prairies," Mickle Street Review 17/18 [2005]). The manuscript is thus difficult to date conclusively, but it was almost certainly written after 1854 and probably before 1860.



Whitman Archive Title: Voltaire's readable
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05315
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Miscellaneous notes or reminders
Date: 1860-1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This scrap can be linked to the article "George Fox and Shakspere" in the section entitled "Elias Hicks" in November Boughs, published 1888. Whitman is referring to a translation of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary (Boston: J. P. Mendum, 1852), where the passage on pages 197-198 clearly discusses Quakers or "primitives."



Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman. 1862.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00026
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Box: 8
Folder: [1862-1863]
Date: 1862-1863
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 102 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 | 84 | 85 | 86 | 87 | 88 | 89 | 90 | 91 | 92 | 93 | 94 | 95 | 96 | 97 | 98 | 99 | 100 | 101 | 102 | 103 | 104 | 105 | 106 | 107 | 108 | 109 | 110 | 111 | 112 | 113 | 114 | 115 | 116 | 117 | 118 | 119 | 120 | 121 | 122 | 123 | 124 | 125 | 126 | 127 | 128 | 129 | 130 | 131 | 132 | 133 | 134 | 135 | 136 | 137 | 138 | 139 | 140 | 141 | 142 | 143 | 144 | 145 | 146 | 147 | 148 | 149 | 150 | 151 | 152 | 153 | 154 | 155 | 156 | 157 | 158 | 159 | 160 | 161 | 162 | 163 | 164 | 165 | 166 | 167 | 168 | 169 | 170 | 171 | 172 | 173 | 174 | 175 | 176 | 177 | 178 | 179 | 180 | 181 | 182 | 183 | 184 | 185 | 186 | 187 | 188 | 189 | 190 | 191 | 192 | 193 | 194 | 195 | 196 | 197 | 198 | 199 | 200 | 201 | 202 | 203 | 204 | 205
Content: A Civil-War-era notebook containing entries written in 1862 and 1863 in both New York and Washington, D.C. Many of the early leaves contain names, addresses, and descriptions of acquaintances in New York. Beginning roughly halfway through the notebook, the entries focus on Whitman's experiences in and around Washington, visiting hospital camps and battle-fields. Several of the entries contributed to published pieces of poetry or prose. Surface 8 bears a clipping and is represented here by two images (8 and 9). Surface 39 (image 40) mentions the "Apollo Summer Garden," which Whitman wrote about in a New York Leader column of 19 April 1862 entitled "City Photographs—No. V." Surfaces 83 and 85 (images 84 and 86) contain notes that constitute a draft of a portion of the seventh installment of the "City Photographs" series on 17 May 1862 (the section titled "Lindmuller's"). Surface 47 (image 48) also contains a reference to "Lindenmuller's Halle," including its street address. Surfaces 67 and 69 (images 66 and 68) are early drafts of "The City Dead-House," a poem that first appeared in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. On surface 89 (image 90) Whitman is drafting the title of "By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame," a poem which first appeared as part of Drum-Taps (1865). Surface 113 (image 114) contains notes about a pile of amputated limbs that contributed to the section of Specimen Days (1882–1883) describing Whitman's visit to an army camp hospital at Falmouth, Virginia, in December 1862, titled "Down at the Front." This section had first appeared in the New York Times on 11 December 1864 in a piece entitled "Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers" and was later reprinted in the New York Weekly Graphic (14 February 1874) and Memoranda During the War (1875–1876). Surface 138 (image 139) contains a prose passage that contributed to the poem "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Grey and Dim," first published in Drum-Taps (1865). Surface 143 (image 144) contains a draft of "The Veteran's Vision," which also first appeared as part of Drum-Taps and was later re-titled "The Artilleryman's Vision." Surface 153 (image 154) contains notes that likely contributed to the poem eventually titled "One's-Self I Sing" (first published, in a different form, as the "Inscription" to the 1867 edition of Leaves). The top half of surface 183 (image 184) contains early draft lines of "A Noiseless, Patient Spider," which first appeared as a section of the poem "Whispers of Heavenly Death" in The Broadway, A London Magazine in October 1868 before being published as its own poem in Passage to India (1871). Surfaces 194 and 195 (images 195 and 196) contain lines that contributed to the poem ultimately titled "Quicksand Years." The poem was first published as "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" in Drum-Taps (1865).



Whitman Archive Title: [(for name?]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05186
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: Undated, on the American Idiom
Date: After 1883
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: In this manuscript, Whitman ruminates about a title, presumably for the piece published as "Slang in America," first in the North American Review (November 1885), and then in November Boughs (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: [? Songs]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04182
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1879-1882
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Sands at Sixty-Three" and "Sands & Spray at 61."



Whitman Archive Title: [? divide into two]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05188
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: Undated, on the American Idiom
Date: After 1880
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: In this manuscript, Whitman considers dividing a draft essay in two. "Slang in America," referred to here in a trial title as "Slang and Names in America," was first published in the North American Review (November 1885), and then in November Boughs (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: [? or Names]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05187
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: Undated, on the American Idiom
Date: After 1884
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: In this manuscript, Whitman ruminates about the titles of two articles; one was published as "Slang in America," first in the periodical the North American Review in November 1885, and then in November Boughs.



Whitman Archive Title: [A September Supplement]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00526
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Supplement Hours
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 cm x 15.5 cm to 21 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts and trial lines of the poem "Supplement Hours," first published posthumously in 1897.



Whitman Archive Title: [Again with latest breath]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00081
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Prayer of Columbus
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 16 cm x 13.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Early draft of lines contributing to "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874. On the verso is a draft of Whitman's prose introduction to the poem.



Whitman Archive Title: [As half caught echoes]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04238
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial lines and notes for an unpublished poem. The first line begins, "As half caught echoes." The relationship of this manuscript to Whitman's published work is unknown.



Whitman Archive Title: [As wild bees hum]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00522
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Supplement Hours
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 cm x 15.5 cm to 21 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts and trial lines of the poem "Supplement Hours," first published posthumously in 1897.



Whitman Archive Title: [Back to these fathomless deeps returning]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00358
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [Blacks]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00374
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: war and hospital notes and memoranda
Date: about 1873
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Held together with two other scraps of paper is a note regarding the skill of black "pilots in the US ships" during the attack on Charleston. The relationship of this manuscript to Whitman's published works is unclear.



Whitman Archive Title: [But Liquid utterance]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04152
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [Camden Notebook]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05506
Series: Notebooks
Box: 3
Folder: [circa 1880], Camden (?) notebook
Date: 1879-1881
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 22 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44
Content: The thirty-first surface in this manuscript notebook contains a note "for Preface" about "gossiping in the candle light" that resonates with the beginning of the second paragraph of the article "My Book and I," published in the Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in January 1887. This same passage also appeared one year later in "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," published within November Boughs (1888) and later included in Leaves of Grass (1891-1892). The manuscript also contains a series of trial titles that Whitman was possibly considering when preparing Specimen Days & Collect (1882-1883). The thirty-fifth leaf contains a draft for a poem, including the deleted line "Away from houses, reading, art" that resembles the second line in the poem "A Clear Midnight," published in Leaves of Grass (1881-1882) and retained thereafter.



Whitman Archive Title: [Centennial Ed'n]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05636
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Trail titles
Date: 1875-1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft advertisement, with information about price, binding and contents, for the Centennial Edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1876. The manuscript is almost identical (with the exception of "Italian boards" instead of "Italian card") to a manuscript held at the University of Virginia (see uva.00163).



Whitman Archive Title: [Century Thoughts]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05074
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Trial titles
Date: 1875-1876
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a list of trial titles which Whitman possibly considered to use in Two Rivulets, the companion volume to the Centennial edition of Leaves of Grass published in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: [Collected in]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06101
Series: Notebooks
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks
Date: 1863-1867
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Content: The seventh surface of this manuscript notebook contains a passage that will appear, with revisions, in the article "Democracy"published in the Galaxy (December 1867). The passage will also appear in Democratic Vistas (1871) and retained in Democratic Vistas and Other Papers (1888) and in Democratic Vistas published within Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [Dec 22 '79]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05505
Series: Notebooks
Box: 3
Folder: [1879]
Date: 1879-1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains what could possibly be a series of trial titles for Specimen Days & Collect published in 1882-1883.



Whitman Archive Title: [Drift Sands]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04231
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1879-1882
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Drift Sands on the Shores of Sixty Years."



Whitman Archive Title: [Drift Sands]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04239
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1879-1882
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial lines and notes for an unpublished poem entitled "Drift Sands." The first line begins, "As we float idly."



Whitman Archive Title: [Drifts & Bubbles]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05073
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Trial titles
Date: 1875-1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a list of trial titles and subtitles which were possibly considered by Whitman when he was preparing the Centennial edition of Leaves of Grass together with its companion volume, Two Rivulets, published in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: [Ebb Tide Ripples]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04173
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles for "Fancies at Navesink," first published in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885).



Whitman Archive Title: [Ebb tide's and death's]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04178
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Fancies at Navesink," first published in The Nineteenth Century August 1885.



Whitman Archive Title: [Ebb—Tide ripples whisperings]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04174
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for the poem "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [Ebb—Tide]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04176
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [Echoes & Drift]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05541
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Trial titles
Date: 1879-1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains what could possibly be trial titles for Specimen Days & Collect published in 1882-1883.



Whitman Archive Title: [Echoes of Ebb Tide]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04172
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Fancies at Navesink," first published in The Nineteenth Century (1885).



Whitman Archive Title: [Ephemeral scenes]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04151
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "By That Long Scan of Waves," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [Ever the Dawn!]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04282
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Trial titles
Date: 1879
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles, written in blue crayon and pencil. Whitman used a version of the phrases here for the cluster title "From Noon to Starry Night," which first appeared in the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The titles are written on the reverse side of a message form from the Camden post office dated August 13, 1879.



Whitman Archive Title: [Farewell my brethren]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00373
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: war and hospital notes and memoranda
Date: about 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On the recto is a cancelled draft of lines from "Song of the Redwood Tree," first published in 1873. On the verso is a meditation on the war, of which the connection to Whitman's published work is unknown.



Whitman Archive Title: [Gaily the outward bound]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05115
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Proudly the Flood Comes In," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [Half-caught promises]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00355
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "Last Ebb, and Daylight Waning," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [He Went Out With the Tide]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01559
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: [1865 or before], war and hospital notes and memoranda
Date: 1885-1891
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a passage used in a note (entitled "Another Note") to the poem "An Ended Day" published in 1891 in Good-Bye My Fancy 2d Annex to Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: [How strange the scenes]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04148
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "By That Long Scan of Waves," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [How they sweep down and out!]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00356
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "Last Ebb, and Daylight Waning," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [How will it do for figure?]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00372
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: on slavery
Date: about 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes and draft lines of a work concerning slavery. The relationship of these lines to Whitman's published work is unknown. On the verso is a page from the November, 1856 Christian Examiner.



Whitman Archive Title: [How ye sweep down and out!]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05117
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [It will seem strange]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05244
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: Robert Burns as Poet and Person
Date: 1882-1886
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This prose scrap alludes to both Rabelais and Robert Burns. Here, Whitman describes Burns' principle qualities as "animal appetites, lusts, and bibulousness." In his essay, "Robert Burns as Poet and Person," Whitman notes that Burns' poetry includes "lyrics of illicit loves and carousing intoxication." This essay, with the preliminary title of "Robert Burns" first appeared in The Critic (16 December 1882), but this particular phrase does not appear in the essay "Robert Burns as Poet and Person" until its publication in The North American Review 143 (November 1886), 429. This essay was later reprinted in Democratic Vistas and Other Papers (1888) and in November Boughs (1888). The essay was also retained, still within November Boughs, in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [Last of the ebb]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00087
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "Last Ebb, and Daylight Waning," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [Light]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00370
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Untitled and Unidentified
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines beginning "Light/ Lives, water, light/ and darkness." These lines have no known relationship to Whitman's published work.



Whitman Archive Title: [Like the young eagle]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00371
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Untitled and Unidentified
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Three scraps of paper held together with draft lines bearing an unknown relationship to Whitman's published work.



Whitman Archive Title: [Mainsails and topsails]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04177
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Proudly the Flood Comes In," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [Names and Slang]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05189
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: Undated, on the American Idiom
Date: After 1880
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: In this manuscript, Whitman ruminates about a title, presumably for the piece published as "Slang in America," first in the North American Review (November 1885), and then in November Boughs (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: [Names]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04184
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1879-1882
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Noon & Sundown Songs" and "Sands on the Shores of 60 & after."



Whitman Archive Title: [Nor rivers' bays' and ocean]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04150
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Fancies at Navesink," first published in 1885.



Whitman Archive Title: [Nor you and trail of yours]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04156
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of poems in the "Fancies at Navesink" cluster, first published in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885). Lines on the recto resemble those in "And Yet Not You Alone" and "Then Last of All." The verso contains lines for "Proudly the Flood Comes In."



Whitman Archive Title: [Nor you and yours alone]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04147
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "And Yet Not You Alone," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [Now Supplement Hours]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00523
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Supplement Hours
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 cm x 15.5 cm to 21 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft and trial lines of a poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, though published posthumously as "Supplement Hours." The poem was part of a cluster entitled "Old Age Echoes," included in an edition of Leaves of Grass compiled by Whitman's literary executors and published in 1897 (Boston: Small, Maynard). On the verso is a prose manuscript recalling Whitman's years in Washington during and after the Civil War. The prose manuscript has no known relationship to his published work.



Whitman Archive Title: [Now for the P]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00515
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Supplement Hours
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 x 15.5 to 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts and trial lines of the poem "Supplement Hours," first published posthumously in 1897.



Whitman Archive Title: [O a new song]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00103
Series: Newspaper Clippings on the Civil War
Box: 4
Folder: Newspaper Clippings on the Civil War
Date: about 1861
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3
Content: A manuscript fragment containing the first two partial lines of the poem "Song of the Banner at Daybreak" first published in 1861 as "Banner at day-Break". The fragment has been pasted to a larger sheet making the verso unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: [O ebbing tide!]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04175
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Fancies at Navesink," first published in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885).



Whitman Archive Title: [Other-Leaves]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04602
Series: Notebooks
Box: 3
Folder: Undated, Notebook pages
Date: 1845–1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Notes for a potential work concerning lines and processions, with the words "Other-Leaves/ Dust-and-Spray" at the top.



Whitman Archive Title: [Proudly the flood comes in]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04170
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Proudly the Flood Come In," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [Resumés]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04181
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1879-1882
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Sands & Drift at Sixty-Three."



Whitman Archive Title: [Ripple and echoes from the]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04236
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: "Drift Sands"
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript containing draft versions of lines that appear before the final paragraph of "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" as the couplet "As idly drifting down the ebb, / Such ripples, half-caught voices, echo from the shore." First published in November Boughs (1888) "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" was mostly made up of material from three previously published pieces: "A Backward Glance on My Own Road (1884)," "How I Made a Book" (1886), and "My Book and I" (1887). The couplet, however, was not part of any of those earlier essays.



Whitman Archive Title: [Sands & Drift]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04224
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1879-1883
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Shore Drift Sands at Sixty-One" and "Sands at 64."



Whitman Archive Title: [Sands & Drift]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04227
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1879-1882
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Sands & Drift from a life's melange."



Whitman Archive Title: [Sands Drifted on the Shores]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04232
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1879-1882
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Sands Drifted on the Shores of a Life in the 19th Century in the New World."



Whitman Archive Title: [Sands Drifted]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04180
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1879-1882
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Sands Drifted" and "Sands Drifted on the Shores of Sixty Years."



Whitman Archive Title: [Sands at 61]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04230
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1879-1882
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Sands at 61" and "Sands Drifted on the Shores of Sixty Years."



Whitman Archive Title: [Sands on the Shores of my 60th year]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04229
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1879
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Sands on the Shores of my 60th year."



Whitman Archive Title: [Sands on the Shores of my 64th year]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04185
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1883
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Sands on the Shores of my 64th year."



Whitman Archive Title: [Sands]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04237
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1879-1882
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Sands on the Shores of 64 & '5."



Whitman Archive Title: [Sane culminating hours]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00516
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Supplement Hours
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 cm x 15.5 cm to 21 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts and trial lines of the poem "Supplement Hours," first published posthumously in 1897.



Whitman Archive Title: [Sane, culminated random hours]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00521
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Supplement Hours
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 cm x 15.5 cm to 21 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts and trial lines of the poem "Supplement Hours," first published posthumously in 1897.



Whitman Archive Title: [Shore Drift Sands at Sixty-One]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04225
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Shore Drift Sands at Sixty-One" and "Drifted Sands at Sixty-One."



Whitman Archive Title: [Smells of the sedge and the shore]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04161
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for the poem "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [Souls of the dying float out with you]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04164
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Fancies at Navesink," first published in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885. The verso of contains draft and trial lines for "Of That Blithe Throat of Thine," first published in Harper's Monthly Magazine (January 1885).



Whitman Archive Title: [Supplement hours of a half Paralytic]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00517
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Supplement Hours
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 cm x 15.5 cm to 21 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts and trial lines of the poem "Supplement Hours," first published posthumously in 1897.



Whitman Archive Title: [Surgeons operating]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00080
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: A March in the Ranks Hard Prest
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 cm x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A clean, late draft of lines published in the poem "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown," first published in 1865. On the verso are prose notes about various corps of Civil War soldiers.



Whitman Archive Title: [Swelling and ebbing the tides]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04165
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft titles for "You Tides with Ceaseless Swell," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [The human heart in its breast]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04171
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Fancies at Navesink," first published in The Nineteent Century (August 1885).



Whitman Archive Title: [The land itself]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04163
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry, correspondence
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Proudly the Flood Come In," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink." On the verso is a letter from an autograph-seeker.



Whitman Archive Title: [The number of the Crusades is]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00071
Series: Lincoln Material
Box: 6
Folder: Lincoln Material Poetry Manuscripts "The Crusades" [1869?]
Date: about 1868-1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: One of several manuscripts in which Whitman records and develops ideas for a poem that never emerged about the crusades. This manuscript contains notes about the time periods and divides between the crusades. While other manuscripts and published works share similarities in topic and idea, a direct link is unknown. The verso contains part of a cancelled letter about the steamer Georgia between Charles Francis Adams, Minister to England during the Civil War, and Earl Russell, British Foreign Minister. Other dated materials containing notes on the crusades suggest this manuscript was likely composed around 1869.



Whitman Archive Title: [Then deeper]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04167
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "Then Last of All," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [Till from the ostent]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04145
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [To the liquid]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04285
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Trial titles
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A series of short phrases, the longest of which is written with hanging indentation. This manuscript probably contributed to the couplet "As idly drifting down the ebb, / Such ripples, half-caught voices, echo from the shore," which appears before the final paragraph of "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," first published in November Boughs (1888). Most of "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" was drawn from three previously published pieces ("A Backward Glance on My Own Road [1884]," "How I Made a Book" [1886], and "My Book and I" [1887]). The couplet, however, was not part of any of those earlier essays. On the reverse side of the manuscript is a letter to Whitman dated November 14, 1884.



Whitman Archive Title: [To you your cosmic]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05114
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Then Last of All," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [To-Day at the peak]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00360
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Glad the Jaunts for the Known
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry, correspondence
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 cm x 21 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of one or possibly two poems beginning "To-Day at the peak" and "Glad the jaunts for the known." Lines from this manuscript were published posthumously as "[Glad the Jaunts for the Known]." On the verso is a letter, dated January, 1888, from James G. Bennett, editor of the New York Herald.



Whitman Archive Title: [Voices of Ebb Tide]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04169
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial title for "Fancies at Navesink," first published in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885).



Whitman Archive Title: [Walt Whitman's Centennial]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05075
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 2
Folder: Trial titles
Date: 1875-1876
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a few trial titles which Whitman possibly considered to use when he was preparing the Centennial edition of Leaves of Grass together with its companion volume, Two Rivulets, published in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: [What burnt-out lives]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04157
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Fancies at Navesink," first published in THe Nineteenth Century (August 1885.



Whitman Archive Title: [What cannot meet all]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05179
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Untitled and Unidentified
Date: 1850-1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The recto of this manuscript is a prose jotting with no known relationship to Whitman's published work. On the verso is a draft poem which is partially illegible. The language used here is similar to many poems by Whitman without being clearly linked to any particular poem.



Whitman Archive Title: [What fiat sends ye out]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04153
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Fancies at Navesink," first published in The Nineteent Century (August 1885).



Whitman Archive Title: [What potent spells]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05103
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft line for "You Tides with Ceaseless Swell," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [What spells do distant stars]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04168
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry, correspondence
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts lines of "You Tides with Ceaseless Swell," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink." On the verso is correspondence on the letterhead of Bim M. Jordan, Dry Paints, Pine Wood Products.



Whitman Archive Title: [What unhelm'd ships and boats]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04166
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Fancies at Navesink," first published in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885).



Whitman Archive Title: [What ventures, aspirations, failures—]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04149
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "And Yet Not You Alone," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [Wing-and-Wing]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04228
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Drift Sands
Date: about 1881-1883
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 14 to 20.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial titles and notes, including "Sands at 64."



Whitman Archive Title: [With many a voice]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04155
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Fancies at Navesink, " first published in 1885.



Whitman Archive Title: [With many a hurried abrupt confession]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05113
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [You neighboring surf—]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00357
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "By that Long Scan of Waves," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [You whirling stream's wild currents]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04160
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Fancies at Navesink," first published in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885.



Whitman Archive Title: [all birth and growth]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00375
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Untitled and Unidentified
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Two scraps of paper held together because of treatment by a collector or archivist. These lines have no known relationship to Whitman's published work.



Whitman Archive Title: [firm strong]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05102
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "You Tides with Ceaseless Swell," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [now away from books—]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00524
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Supplement Hours
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 cm x 15.5 cm to 21 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts and trial lines of the poem "Supplement Hours," first published posthumously in 1897.



Whitman Archive Title: [rivers', bays' and ocean shores']
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04146
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "And Yet Not You Alone," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [scene in the woods on]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00484
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Box: 8
Folder: Notebooks, [circa 1863–1864], Washington hospital notebook
Date: 1863–1864
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 24 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48
Content: A small, homemade notebook which contains, among other notes, an account of the retreat following the battle of White Oaks Church, as told to Whitman by Milton Roberts. Whitman used many of the scences from Roberts's story in the poem, "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown," first published in Drum-Taps (1865). Adam Bradford writes about this notebook and its connection to "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown"; see "Re-Collecting Soldiers: Walt Whitman and the Appreciation of Human Value," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 27.3 (Winter 2010), 127-52.



Whitman Archive Title: [swell and ebb!]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04159
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "Then Last of All," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [the intellectual and emotional]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02813
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: War and hospital notes and memoranda
Date: about 1891
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft fragment of a note for the short poem "An Ended Day," which was first published in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891).



Whitman Archive Title: [the strong right]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00369
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: The Strong Right Hand
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A couple of trial lines for an unrealized poem, beginning "the strong right hand." These lines have no known relationship to Whitman's published work.



Whitman Archive Title: [the wild Bee flitting hums]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00525
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Supplement Hours
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 cm x 15.5 cm to 21 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Drafts and trial lines of the poem "Supplement Hours," first published posthumously in 1897.



Whitman Archive Title: [worldly and gaily comes]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05104
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines for "Proudly the Flood Comes In," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [you ye ebbing]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00086
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Fancies at Navesink
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 3 cm x 15 cm to 25 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of "Last Ebb, and Daylight Waning," first published along with seven other poems in The Nineteenth Century (August 1885), under the general title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: a schoolmaster
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04588
Series: Notebooks
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks c. 1852?
Date: Before or early in 1852
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 11 leaves, handwritten, print
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22
Content: The plot described in this notebook corresponds to Whitman's novel Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography, published serially in the New York Sunday Dispatch from March 14 to April 18, 1852. Two Tribune clippings pasted onto one of the pages of this notebook also are dated 1852. The writing in the notebook therefore probably dates to before or early in 1852. The name of the character "Covert" also appears in Whitman's story "Revenge and Requital; A Tale of a Murderer Escaped," first published in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in July–August 1845, although the plot of that story bears only minor resemblance to the plot of Jack Engle. Covert, a villainous lawyer in both tales, may have been based on a man from Whitman's own experience. For more about this connection and the composition and publication of Jack Engle, see Zachary Turpin, "Introduction to Walt Whitman's 'Life and Adventures of Jack Engle,'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 34 (2017), 225–261. Whitman also copied two excerpts of poetry in this notebook (surface 19). The first poetic quotation comes from Robert Blair's poem "The Grave" (1743). The source of the second quotation is unknown. The note on the verso of what is represented here as the last page of this notebook is upside down, suggesting that Whitman may have begun writing from one direction in this notebook, then flipped it over and started writing in the other direction. The cover of the notebook is labeled "Note Book Walt Whitman 82" in a hand that is not Whitman's.



Whitman Archive Title: for Tramp and strike question
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05252
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: The Tramp and Strike Questions
Date: 1879-1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This prose scrap, titled "for Tramp & Strike Question," varies in its wording from the undelivered address "The Tramp and Strike Question." Nonetheless, it reflects themes present in the address eventually published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883).



Whitman Archive Title: for lect on Literature
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05629
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Date: 1850s or 1860s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman's heading indicates that these brief notes were intended for a lecture on "Literature" or "Democracy." The notes contain only two short lines, both about "literary men." Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1591). This date can be supported by Whitman's interest in oratory and goal of becoming a lecturer in the 1850s, though he also maintained these interests in the 1860s. He explained in a letter to his mother of June 9, 1863: "I think something of commencing a series of lectures & readings &c. through different cities of the north, to supply myself with funds for my Hospital & Soldiers visits." Whitman's meditation on literature and its relation to "Democracy" in this manuscript may have contributed to his essay "Democracy," which appeared in the Galaxy in 1867 and was later incorporated into Democratic Vistas (1871).



Whitman Archive Title: for the Strike & Tramp questions
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05258
Series: Notes and Memoranda
Box: 1
Folder: The Tramp and Strike Questions
Date: 1879-1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This prose scrap, titled "for The Strike & Tramp questions," varies in its wording from the undelivered address "The Tramp and Strike Question." Nonetheless, it reflects themes present in the address eventually published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883).



Whitman Archive Title: from the traditional commencement
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02806
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Memoranda (Old and New) of Camden
Date: 1868-1871
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The note in this manuscript bears resemblance to the general theme of the poem "Passage to India," which was published in the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass, and was retained in all the subsequent editions.



Whitman Archive Title: from the traditional commencement
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02806
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Memoranda (Old and New) of Camden
Date: 1868-1871
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The note in this manuscript bears resemblance to the general theme of the poem "Passage to India", which was published in the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass, and was retained in all the subsequent editions.



Whitman Archive Title: from the traditional commencement
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02806
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Memoranda (Old and New) of Camden
Date: 1868-1871
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The note in this manuscript bears resemblance to the general theme of the poem "Passage to India," which was published in the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass, and was retained in all the subsequent editions.



Whitman Archive Title: his poem of the
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05619
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Untitled and Unidentified; Undated, on the American Idiom
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These two scraps once formed part of a larger leaf and contain a crossed-out section of prose that seems to be discussing the human form and its treatment in literature. The phrase "organs and acts," which begins on the first scrap and continues onto the second, is also found in the poem that would eventually be titled "Starting from Paumanok". The poem originally appeared as the first poem in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, titled "Proto-leaf." It took its final title in the 1867 edition. On the reverse side is a manuscript (loc.05620) containing a draft of an unpublished piece of journalism or essay.



Whitman Archive Title: human feet, awaits us
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05625
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The content of this manuscript, in which Whitman writes that true knowledge and experience do not come from books, is similar to material found in Whitman's early notebooks and in the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Based on this and the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to before or early in 1855 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:188).



Whitman Archive Title: of these poems
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04600
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Date: Between 1845 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A prose manuscript fragment in which Whitman discusses a range of topics, including a discussion, in the third person, of a person who "demands reality in literature." It is unclear if Whitman is referring to himself or to somebody else. Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1850s or earlier (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1429). On the verso Whitman has copied two stanzas of English poet William Collins' "The Passions. An Ode for Music."



Whitman Archive Title: paths of rhyme
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05618
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: Untitled and Unidentified
Date: 1857-1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The sentiments about the poet and versification are present in the revised "Preface, 1855, to first issue of 'Leaves of Grass,'" published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882-1883). Grier dates this scrap from 1857, and the verso has a printed date of 185-.



Whitman Archive Title: principal personages of the
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07417
Series: Lincoln Material
Box: 6
Folder: Lincoln Material Poetry Manuscripts "The Crusades" [1869?]
Date: Around 1869
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: One of a number of manuscripts in which Whitman records and develops ideas for a poem that never emerged about the Crusades. In this particular manuscript, Whitman lists figures such as "Peter the Hermit" and "The Popes." While Whitman mentions the Crusades specifically in both his prose works Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and Democratic Vistas (1871), a direct link between these manuscript notes and any of his published works is unclear. Other dated materials containing notes on the Crusades suggest this manuscript was likely composed around 1869. The verso contains part of a cancelled letter between Charles Francis Adams, Minister to England during the Civil War, and Earl Russell, British Foreign Minister, regarding the Confederate steamer Georgia, which Whitman would have had to copy from another published document.



Whitman Archive Title: some threading Ohio's
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00082
Series: Manuscripts
Box: 1
Folder: As Consequent, etc.
Date: 1881
Genre: poetry, correspondence
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 13 cm x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines of "As Consequent, Etc.," first published in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. On the reverse is a letter from the Camden and Atlantic Railroad dated January 25, 1881.



Whitman Archive Title: truly what is commonest
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05641
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The words that appear near the beginning of this scrap are similar to a line from "Song of Myself," in which Whitman writes "What is commonest and cheapest and nearest and easiest is Me." Thus, it is likely that this manuscript dates from before or early in 1855.



Whitman Archive Title: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Series: Supplementary Papers
Box: 7
Folder: Photocopies Notebooks [before 1855]
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 31 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61
Content: This notebook, now lost, contains much draft material used in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in addition to a few images and phrasings that Whitman used in the second (1856) and third (1860) editions. As the folder title indicates, the notebook is currently represented by photocopied images of each page derived, apparently, from a microfilm of the original that was made in the 1930s prior to the notebook's disappearance from the collection during World War II. As Floyd Stovall has noted, the few datable references in this notebook (e.g., the fighting at Sebastopol during the Crimean War) are to events from about 1853 to late 1854, shortly before the first publication of Leaves of Grass. See Stovall, "Dating Whitman's Early Notebooks," Studies in Bibliography 24 (1971), 197–204. See also Edward Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:138–155. Surfaces 9, 10, 54, and 55 bear passages that probably contributed to the first poem of the 1855 edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself," and other material, on surfaces 26, 46, 51, 54, and 58, is clearly linked to the evolution of that poem. A passage on surface 23 is also perhaps related to its development. Surfaces 11 and 12 both have material probably used as fodder for the poem "Song of the Answerer," first published as the seventh poem in the 1855 Leaves. A brief passage on surface 12 possibly contributed to the poem first published in 1860 as the fourth of the "Chants Democratic" and later retitled "Our Old Feuillage." Surfaces 13 and 46 contain drafts of passages used in the second poem of 1855, later titled "A Song for Occupations." Material on surfaces 24 and 47 probably also contributed to this poem. Passages on surfaces 17, 18, 40, 42, and 45 are likely early drafts toward lines used in "Poem of the Sayers of the Words of the Earth" (1856), which later became "A Song of the Rolling Earth." Surface 18 also bears writing probably related to the twelfth and final poem of the 1855 Leaves, later titled "Faces." On surfaces 18, 24, and 51 are lines that might represent draft material toward "I Sing the Body Electric" (first published as the fifth poem of the 1855 Leaves). Other passages, on surfaces 47 and 55, are likely related to that poem; those on surfaces 36, 37, 44, 45, and 47 are certainly related. Ideas and images written on surfaces 20 and 46 are likely related to the poem "Song of the Open Road," which first appeared as "Poem of the Road," and a passage on surface 24 may also be related. Two passages on surface 21 were used in the tenth poem of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, later titled "There Was a Child Went Forth." Surface 22 contains writing probably used in "Sun-Down Poem" (1856), titled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in later editions. Some of the writing on surface 24 might also have contributed to the development of that poem. Another passage on surface 22, as well as passages on surfaces 26, 47, and 60, are possibly related to the 1855 Preface. A different passage on surface 60 is clearly related to the Preface, and a passage on surface 45 is likely related to it. Two of the draft lines of poetry on surface 31 were used in the untitled third poem of the "Debris" cluster in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. This poem was retitled "Leaflets" in 1867 and dropped from subsequent editions. The writing on surface 41 contributed to the 1856 "Poem of Salutation," which was eventually titled "Salut au Monde!" The jotting at the top of surface 43 is also likely connected to this poem.



Whitman Archive Title: you know how
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00142
Series: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, [1847]-[circa 1863-1864]
Box: 8
Folder: Notebooks, [Before 1855]
Date: 1855 or before
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28
Content: Because it comprises material that Whitman used in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, this notebook must date to sometime before mid-1855.Emory Holloway has posited several connections between passages in this notebook and specific lines in the 1855 edition. Although some of these connections are dubious, the notebook's series of drafts about the effects of music are clearly related to what ultimately became section 26 of "Song of Myself." See Emory Holloway, ed., The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1921), 2:83–86.




Restrictions: None

Preferred Citation:  To identify this catalog as a source, see the Archive's "Conditions of Use" page.


Repository Contact Information:

The Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division
Room LM101, James Madison Building
101 Independence Ave., S.E.
Washington, D.C. 20540-4680
http://www.loc.gov


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