Resources

Integrated Catalog of Walt Whitman's Literary Manuscripts

Abstract:

This Integrated Catalog was created by the Walt Whitman Archive through the work of the EAD Project Team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The machine-readable catalog, EAD encoding, and XSLT stylesheets were created by Brett Barney, Caterina Bernardini, Janel Cayer, Mary Ellen Ducey, Andrew Jewell, Courtney Lawton, Elizabeth Lorang, Kevin McMullen, and Brian Pytlik Zillig, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and English Department. Kenneth M. Price, co-editor of the Walt Whitman Archive, and Katherine L. Walter were primary investigators for an initial grant received from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, which provided major funding for an early stage of this project. Additional funding provided by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the University of Nebraska Research Council helped further advance our early work on an Integrated Guide to Walt Whitman's Poetry Manuscripts. After completion of the poetry manuscripts integrated guide, we sought to extend the project to all Whitman manuscripts, poetry and prose alike. That work has received generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our recent efforts have been dedicated to writing item-level entries for those prose manuscripts which could be identified as contributing directly to a published work. We hope ultimately to extend our treatment of Whitman's prose to all manuscripts, whether or not the manuscript led to a known publication.

Scope and Content: 

This Integrated Catalog of Walt Whitman's Literary Manuscripts provides item-level descriptions and, when available, images of all identified literary manuscripts located in archival repositories around the world. This Catalog deals only with items Whitman Archive staff have deemed poetry and/or prose manuscripts. Nearly all of Whitman's poetry manuscripts are represented in the Catalog. Because of the sheer volume of manuscripts that could be categorized as "prose" (in effect, any item handwritten by Whitman that was not poetry, correspondence, or marginalia) we initially limited our item-level descriptions of prose material to only those items that could be identified, with reasonable confidence, as having contributed to a piece of published prose. As part of a project treating Whitman's writings before the publication of Leaves of Grass, we have since added item-level descriptions of all prose manuscripts which we believe were written before or early in 1855. We intend to eventually include item-level descriptions for all prose manuscripts.

This Integrated Catalog is organized alphabetically by uniform work title and chronologically by composition date within each work. We define a "work" as the abstract idea of an individual piece of writing (poem, prose section, prose essay, etc.). We derive the uniform work title from the final published title used by Whitman during his lifetime. In most cases this is the title assigned in the final printing of Leaves of Grass (1891-92) or Complete Prose Works (1892). It should be noted, however, that some poems and prose pieces were published in earlier volumes but were not retained in these final volumes. Thus, for example, a poem that appeared in the 1860, 1867, and 1872 editions of Leaves of Grass but then was dropped from future printings would take as its uniform title that which Whitman gave to it in the 1872 edition. If we are unable to determine a particular manuscript's relationship to a published work, we consider it a work unto itself and assign a uniform work title based on the first words appearing on the manuscript.

Uniform work titles are displayed in large font, with individual items related to each work described in detail below them. The grouping of individual manuscripts by work is intended both for the navigational ease of the site's users (since users are most familiar with Whitman’s final titles) as well as to reflect the complex nature of Whitman's composition and revision methods, in which a single manuscript may contain bits of text that eventually found their way into several different works. Thus, a manuscript may appear multiple times within the Integrated Catalog, listed separately under each work to which it contributed.

Each item-level entry provides a title, date, genre, repository location information, physical characteristics, and a description of the textual content of the item. Access to images of the original item are also provided whenever possible.


Biographical Information:

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


[222—No.—(? Have you supplied]

Whitman Archive Title: [222—No.—(? Have you supplied]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00028
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1850-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Two scraps of paper, pasted together to form one leaf. The relation of this manuscript to Whitman's published work is unclear.


Abraham Lincoln

Whitman Archive Title: But the time speeds
Whitman Archive ID: ihm.00001
Repository: Iowa Historical Museum (Des Moines)
Date: 1875–1886
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Scraps of paper attached to a larger sheet to create one leaf. Together the scraps form a draft fragment of "Abraham Lincoln," a short essay that first appeared as "Dear to Democracy" in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln (1886), a compilation of essays edited by Allen Thorndike Rice. Though Whitman was not fond of this essay, he reprinted it in November Boughs (1888) before including the final version in Complete Prose Works (1892). For more information on this manuscript, including a complete transcription, see Ed Folsom, "Holograph Page of Whitman's 'Abraham Lincoln,'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 5.3 (Winter 1988), 47–48.



Whitman Archive Title: [for closing passage]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01799
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 37
Folder: ca. 1877–1883, Death of Abraham Lincoln, notes
Date: 1875–1886
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A heavily revised prose manuscript in which Whitman worked through ideas on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Whitman himself scrawled "Death of Abraham Lincoln" at the top of this manuscript; however, no other textual link can be made between this manuscript and "Death of Abraham Lincoln." This manuscript appears to be a draft of another prose piece on Lincoln, titled "Abraham Lincoln." This essay was first published, untitled, in Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln (1886). Whitman reprinted this essay in November Boughs (1888). A revised version of the essay appeared in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [for Abraham Lincoln]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01800
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 37
Folder: ca. 1877–1883, 'Death of Abraham Lincoln,' notes
Date: 1877–1886
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Notes toward a draft of "Abraham Lincoln," first published, untitled, in Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln (1886). Whitman reprinted this essay in November Boughs (1888). A revised version of the essay appeared in Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman composed these notes on a piece of incoming correspondence.


absolutely reject the

Whitman Archive Title: [reject the claims of the genre Culturists]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02307
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: Literary, Undated, Model American
Date: undated
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: One leaf with notes about how American life and character differs from the "claims of the culturists."


Additional Note, 1887, to English Edition "Specimen Days"

Whitman Archive Title: Additional Note written 1887 for the English Edition.
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00002
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1887
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: A nearly complete draft of an essay Whitman wrote for the English Edition of Specimen Days. This essay first appeared in 1887 as "Additional Note. Written 1887 for the English Edition." Whitman slightly revised the title, changing it to "Additional Note, 1887, to English Edition 'Specimen Days,'" before including it in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Address Book

Whitman Archive Title: Address Book
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02821
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


[Advance shapes like his shape]

Whitman Archive Title: Advance shapes like his shape
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00028
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Date: Between 1854 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The ellipses would suggest that this is an early manuscript, probably written in the mid- to late-1850s. It is an adaptation of notes Whitman took about Egypt, almost certainly from his reading of Sir John Gardner Wilkinson's Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1837). Related information about Sesostris appears on page 29 of the first volume in Wilkinson's collection, though Whitman may have been reading a different edition. Whitman used the information in his article "One of the Lessons Bordering Broadway: The Egyptian Museum," published in Life Illustrated on December 8, 1855. Similar descriptions of Sesostris appear in several of Whitman's other notes and manuscripts, including "Immortality was realized" and "Abraham's visit to Egypt," two sets of manuscript notes about Egypt that Edward Grier dates to between 1855 and 1860 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 5:1922; 6:2022); and the notebook "women," including the fragments from that notebook that Whitman reused to create the larger page "Chronological."


[After an Extract from Heine's Diary]

Whitman Archive Title: Notebook, 1868-1870
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00350
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


After certain disastrous campaigns

Whitman Archive Title: After certain disastrous campaigns
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00006
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository Title: After certain disastrous campaigns: autograph poem
Repository ID: MA 518.3
Date: between 1862 and 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, "After Certain Disastrous Campaigns" was published first in The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, ed. Emory Holloway (Garden City, N.Y., Toronto: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1921). The manuscript shows that Whitman originally considered the title "Answer me, year of repulses," which is also the first line of the poem.


After the Argument

Whitman Archive Title: After the Argument
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00001
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: After the Argument (1891). A.MS.S. draft
Date: 1890 or 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 9.5 x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of "After the Argument." The poem was published first in Lippincott's Magazine, March, 1891.



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age Echoes
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00228
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Echoes (1891). Proof Sheet.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28.5 x 16.5 cm, 6 x 14 cm attached, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof sheet of "Old Age Echoes" with many corrections written in ink and pencil. "Old Age Echoes" is a general heading for four poems: "Sounds of the Winter," "The Unexpress'd," "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!," and "After the Argument."


After the Dazzle of Day

Whitman Archive Title: After the Dazzle of Day
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00002
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: After the Dazzle of Day (1888). A.MS. draft
Date: 1887 or 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14 x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This four-line poem was first published in the New York Herald, February 3, 1888. In the lower right-hand corner is the notation: "For Francis Howard Williams, May 1896, Traubel."


After the Sea-Ship

Whitman Archive Title: Waves in the Vessel's wake
Whitman Archive ID: mil.00001
Repository: Mills College: Albert M. Bender Collection, Special Collections Department, F. W. Olin Library
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily revised draft of a poem that, after extensive further revision, was first published in the December 1874 issue of the New York Daily Graphic as "In the Wake Following." The poem first appeared under its final title, "After the Sea-Ship," in the "Sea-Drift" group of Two Rivulets (1876).



Whitman Archive Title: Song of the Redwood Tree
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00064
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 90
Repository ID: #3829
Date: about 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 20 leaves, 11 x 12.5 cm to 22.5 x 17.5 cm, 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
Content: This manuscript contains a rough draft of the poem "Song of the Redwood-Tree" written, according to a note intialed by Whitman, during October and November 1873 prior to its first publication in the February 1874 issue of Harper's Magazine. In 1876 the poem was published in the group "Centennial Songs" and annexed to Two Rivulets. The poem appears ungrouped again in Leaves of Grass (1881). Several leaves contain deleted and undeleted titles or variant verse references to other published poems: "Eidólons", "Waves in the Vessel's Wake", "(a sonnet)" written "for Century Verses," which appears from a Library of Congress manuscript to have been a working title of the group that became "Centennial Verses" and "A California song".


After the Supper and Talk

Whitman Archive Title: After the Supper and Talk
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00082
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 2
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of "After the Supper and Talk". This poem was rejected by Harper's in 1885 but published in Lippincott's Magazine in November 1887, after which it eventually became the final poem in the "First Annex" titled "Sands at Seventy." To the verso are pasted sections 16 and 18-19 of "Poem of Joys" (final title: "A Song of Joys") clipped either from the independent book Passage to India (1871) or from the "Passage to India" supplement to Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: So Loth to Depart!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00003
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: After the Supper and Talk (1888). A.MS. drafts
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 26 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of poem later revised and published as "After the Supper and Talk" in 1887. On verso detached from Leaves of Grass, part of "Poem of Joys," first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, and later published as "A Song of Joys." The title "Poem of Joys" is in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: After the Supper and Talk
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00175
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: After the Supper and talk (1887). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A proof of "After the Supper and Talk," with corrections (all punctuation) in ink and two words written in purple pencil: "30 Copies." This poem was published first in 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00326
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of a collection of four poems ("You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone") under the general title "November Boughs." This proof is made by pasting together proofs of each poem in the order desired.



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02484
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proofs of a collection of four poems ("You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone") under the general title "November Boughs."



Whitman Archive Title: After the Supper and Talk
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00004
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: After the Supper and Talk (1888). A.MS. drafts
Date: between 1884 and 1888
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 x 25.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Signed draft of the poem "After the Supper and Talk," which was first submitted to Harper's in 1885 but was rejected. It was later published in Lippincott's Magazine in November, 1887. This manuscript draft, however, may well have been intended for neither journal because of the reference to "volume" in the bracketed note. In November Boughs (1888) Whitman used "After the Supper and Talk" as the concluding poem in the volume; it was followed by numerous prose pieces. On the reverse of this manuscript leaf is pasted a proof sheet from the poem eventually titled "Song of the Exposition," with one correction.



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04206
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Printed Copy.
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Clipping from a newspaper of four Whitman poems: "You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone." At the top is the title "November Boughs." At the bottom of the clipping is written, in Whitman's hand, "1887." The poems were published first in Lippincott's Magazine, November, 1887.


After Thought or Two, & After-Songs, An

Whitman Archive Title: An After Thought or Two
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00286
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: 1855 or later
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript title, apparently for a group of poems, never used in Whitman's published work. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Poem, as in a rapt and," and "Poem ante-dating."


Afternoon Scene, An

Whitman Archive Title: ? the sky
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06100
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Airs of Lilac Time

Whitman Archive Title: Airs of Lilac Time
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00145
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, 1870? Airs of Lilac Time
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: A bound notebook with a title page reading "Airs of Lilac Time for 1870, '71, &c" and two pages with lists of words and a few trial lines.


All birth and growth

Whitman Archive Title: [all birth and growth]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00375
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


All is Truth

Whitman Archive Title: As of the The Truth
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00206
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, leaf 2 19.5 x 13 cm, all other leaves 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: This poem became section 18 of the cluster "Leaves of Grass" in the 1860 edition. In 1872 the poem received the title "All is Truth," and in 1881, after various repositionings, it was finally transferred to the cluster "From Noon to Starry Night". The second leaf is a composite formed when Whitman deleted and cut away the original first two verses on the leaf, flipped the new small section over and upside-down, pasted it to the foot of the remaining original verses, and inscribed a verse in light ink on the newly created blank space.


[All that we are]

Whitman Archive Title: All that we are
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00023
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: II-5 21
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of fifteen lines of poetry, first published only after Whitman's death in Notes and Fragments (1899). The last three lines on this manuscript leaf appear in another version in a long manuscript, "Pictures," which probably dates to the 1850s and is held at the Beinecke Library, Yale.


Amadis of Gaul, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Amadis of Gaul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05546
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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."


America [Centre of equal daughters]

Whitman Archive Title: America
Whitman Archive ID: pri.00002
Repository: Princeton University Library: Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
Box: 22
Folder: 9
Date: 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Lightly corrected and signed draft, six lines, of "America," a poem published first in the New York Herald on March 12, 1888. It was reprinted in November Boughs (1888) and in the "Sands at Seventy" annex of Leaves of Grass (1891–92). The manuscript is written on the reverse of a letter fragment from an unknown correspondent, dated January 27, 1888.


America needs her own poems

Whitman Archive Title: America needs her own poems
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00131
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: "America needs her own poems, in her own body and spirit"
Date: early 1860s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This brief and heavily revised prose manuscript treats an idea that interested Whitman throughout his career, namely, that America requires its own "freer, more muscular" poems rather than "superb chronicles" with "smooth rhymes" imported from Europe. The manuscript, however, bears no clear connections to any specific published work. This manuscript probably dates to the early 1860s, as it appears to have been inscribed after the writing on the reverse side of the leaf (duk.00795), which contains draft lines that contributed to poems first published in the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass.


America [No Homer]

Whitman Archive Title: America
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00006
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: America (1888). A.MS. Draft.
Date: between 1870 and 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 18.5 x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Despite the title, this manuscript does not appear to be a draft of the poem, "America," published in 1888, but it has been published separately and posthumously as "[America]" and begins "No Homer, Shakspere, Voltaire." This manuscript was likely composed in the last two decades of Whitman's career (roughly 1870-1892) when he was more apt to mention other writers explicitly in his poetry.


American National Literature

Whitman Archive Title: Goethe
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00178
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 80
Date: 1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Notes that Whitman made about Goethe. Unlike many of Whitman's other notes about authors, these notes seem to be based at least in part on his own observations rather than on secondary criticism. Some of the ideas contained in the scrap (particularly the final portion of the second leaf) found their way into Whitman's essay "American National Literature," which appeared in the North American Review in March 1891, under the title "Have We a National Literature?" It was later reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891), under the title "American National Literature" before finally appearing in Complete Prose Works (1892). Although the essay was not published until later, Edward Grier suggests that the manuscript dates from late 1856 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984] 5:1827). Pasted on the reverse of the first page is a clipping from an article entitled "The True Character of Goethe."



Whitman Archive Title: First, to me
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00091
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: First, to me, come the People
Date: about 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A prose fragment that Whitman used in the essay, "American National Literature," first published in the North American Review in March 1891, under the title "Have We a National Literature?" The essay was reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) before finally being collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [and a surplus of a hundred millions & more]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01055
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "These States and the Kosmical Scale," draft
Date: 1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is a partial draft of "American National Literature. Is There Any Such Thing—or Can There Ever Be?," which first appeared in the March 1891 issue of North American Review under the title, "Have We a National Literature?" before appearing in Good-Bye By Fancy (1891, and Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [In the main I]
Whitman Archive ID: sal.00003
Repository: Salisbury House and Gardens, Des Moines, Iowa
Repository ID: 2010.9.262
Date: about 1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft fragment of "American National Literature," first published in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891). Whitman included this piece of literary criticism in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: National Literature
Whitman Archive ID: amh.00017
Repository: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Date: 1890 or 1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The first page of a draft essay that was published in the March 1891 issue of The North American Review under the title "Have We a National Literature?" It was later reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891), under the title "American National Literature" before finally appearing in Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman's extensive revisions are done in ink and several different colors of pencil, and the two scraps of paper that constitute this manuscript leaf were pasted together by the author to create a single inscribed surface. The whole has been affixed, probably by Horace Traubel, one of Whitman's literary executors, to a backing sheet made of letterhead stationery from the office of "The Artsman." Traubel's note on the backing sheet's lower right corner is dated 1907 and indicates that he presented this item to William Gable.



Whitman Archive Title: Germany, or even Europe
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05316
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Then Another and very grave point]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00012
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1890–1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A partial draft of "American National Literature: Is There Any Such Thing—or Can There Ever Be?," which appeared in the March 1891 issue of North American Review, as "Have We a National Literature?" before being collected in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891).


America's Back-Bone

Whitman Archive Title: New American pictures
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05341
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


America's Bulk Average

Whitman Archive Title: [Which leads me to another point]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01074
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "The Whole Past Century," draft
Date: about 1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: In these prose notes, Whitman reflects on the impact of the Civil War on the nation. Written at the top of the page, in an unknown hand, possibly that of Horace Traubel, "see notes Mar 18 1891." This manuscript contributed to "American's Bulk Average," which first appeared in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) before being collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


America's Mightiest Inheritance

Whitman Archive Title: List of serviceable
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05211
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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").


Among the Multitude

Whitman Archive Title: To One Who Will Understand
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00336
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of pink paper (21.5 x 13 cm), in black ink, with revisions in the same ink, in pencil, and in fine ink (in that order). Pinholes mostly in center. Originally titled "To Those Who Will Understand" and numbered 100 (then 101, then the current ?100 in the fine pen). This was revised to form section 41 of "Calamus" in 1860 and was permanently retitled "Among the Multitude" in the 1867 Leaves.


An English and an American Poet

Whitman Archive Title: the most definitely
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00945
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 4 to 196 (Volume 196)
Date: 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This prose fragment appears to be part of a draft of the essay, written by Whitman, titled "An English and an American Poet." Whitman published the essay anonymously in the American Phrenological Journal in October 1855, and he also printed and included it with other reviews in some copies of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. He printed the review yet again in a section of reviews called "Opinions. 1855–6" at the end of the 1856 edition. A prose note (duk.00154) is written on the back of the manuscript leaf.


analogy holds in this, The

Whitman Archive Title: The analogy
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05176
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


[And here is the great meteor]

Whitman Archive Title: [And here is the great Meteor]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00216
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Meteors (1853). A. MS. draft
Date: between 1850-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 25 x 18 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A draft of an unpublished poem, part of which has been connected to the unpublished poem "Pictures." The relationship to Whitman's published verse is unknown.


And to the soul every

Whitman Archive Title: And to the soul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05175
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


And Yet Not You Alone

Whitman Archive Title: [rivers', bays' and ocean shores']
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04146
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Nor you and yours alone]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04147
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [What ventures, aspirations, failures—]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04149
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Nor you and trail of yours]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04156
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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 alone
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00049
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a draft of the poem "And Yet Not You Alone," published as part of "Fancies at Navesink" in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. The draft also has, in the bottom margin, the title of the poem which follows it in "Fancies at Navesink," "Proudly the Flood Comes In." This manuscript is bound with others under the title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: your needed blending discord-parts
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00050
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a draft of the poem "And Yet Not You Alone," published as part of "Fancies at Navesink" in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. This manuscript is bound with others under the title "Fancies at Navesink."


Animals, says George Eliot

Whitman Archive Title: ['Animals,' says George Eliot]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00091
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Three manuscript leaves and two newspaper clippings pasted to a larger backing sheet. All but one of the scraps presents an aphorism attributable to someone other than Whitman. The other, also aphoristic, is fragmentary but appears to be a draft line of verse. According to Edward F. Grier, the handwriting in the first and third paragraphs is that of the 1850s or 1860s; that of the second one seems to be the looser, more irregular writing of the 1870s.


Are You the New Person Drawn toward Me?

Whitman Archive Title: To a new personal admirer
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00332
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, leaf 1 13 x 11.5 cm; leaf 2 20 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two pieces of white wove paper, 13 x 11.5 and 20 x 16 cm, in brown-black ink, with substantial revisions in the same ink. Pinholes mostly at center and in left margins of both pages. This poem, featuring a new first line, became section 12 of "Calamus" in 1860; in 1867 Whitman dropped the last 2 1/2 lines and permanently retitled it "Are you the New Person Drawn Toward Me?" The first page contains verses corresponding to lines 2-3 of the 1860 version, and the lines on the second page ("Do you suppose you can easily/ be my lover,...") became verses 4-11.


armies & navies pass on

Whitman Archive Title: armies & navies pass on the surface
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00005
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 1
Date: About the 1850s or 1860s
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript, probably written in the 1850s or 1860s, contains approximately five lines toward a poem about the effects of war that is not known to have been published in Whitman's lifetime. On the reverse side of the leaf (tex.00467) are two sentences or lines, one headed "Locust," and the other headed "Sunflower," which may have contributed to a piece of Civil War-era journalism.


Art Features

Whitman Archive Title: the RR we go on
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00242
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 111
Date: 1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 8 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16
Content: Pages of notes from Whitman's western railroad journey in September 1879. The pages describe his travels through Missouri and Kansas, and large portions of the notes would find their way into Specimen Days (specifically, the sections entitled "Missouri State," "Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas," "Art Features," and "A Silent Little Follower—The Coreopsis").


Artilleryman's Vision

Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman. 1862.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00026
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free. And Other Poems

Whitman Archive Title: [Americans are charged with disproportionate brag and]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00003
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 1
Date: 1819-1872
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A paragraph, heavily revised, expressing the opinion that the United States is the culmination of human development. A note at the bottom of the sheet, "As a Strong Bird," may refer to the poem "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free," which was first published in the New York Herald on 26 June 1872. Extracts from this poem also appeared in the Washington Evening Star on the same date, within a larger article on the commencement exercises at Dartmouth College. It more likely, however, refers to the slender volume in which the poem was published later that year, As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free. And Other Poems. This manuscript is probably part of an early draft of the preface for that volume. The poem "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free" was subsequently included in Two Rivulets (1876). After adding a new opening stanza and making additional revisions, Whitman incorporated the poem into Leaves of Grass (1881–82) under the new title "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood." The preface was reprinted, with minor changes, as "Preface, 1872, to 'As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free'" in the 1892 volume Comple Prose Works.



Whitman Archive Title: [Land of the potent-large!]
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00001
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 1
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript includes a fragment of a poem, approximately seven lines, that is possibly from an early draft of "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free," a poem Whitman originally wrote for the June 1872 Dartmouth College commencement exercises. This poem was later revised and published as "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood," Leaves of Grass (1881–1882).


As at Thy Portals Also Death

Whitman Archive Title: As at thy Portals also Death
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00006
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 1
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft, with revisions, of "As at Thy Portals Also Death," which was first published in the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. A second, smaller leaf, was at some point pasted over the lines at the bottom of the first leaf, but it has become separated and is at present stored separately as "[To her, the ideal woman]."



Whitman Archive Title: [To her, the ideal woman]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00048
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft, with revisions, of the final three lines of "As at Thy Portals Also Death," which was first published in the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass.


As Consequent

Whitman Archive Title: Autumn Rivulets
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00181
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Autumn Rivulets (1881). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A proof of "As Consequent, Etc.," with cancelled title. This proof is housed at the Library of Congress with another, similarly marked, proof of "As Consequent, Etc. " (Whitman Archive ID: loc.00494) and unmarked proofs of the following poems: "From Far Dakota's Cañons," "A Farm Picture," "What Best I See on Thee" (U.S. Grant), "The Sobbing of the Bells," "Italian Music in Dakota," "By Broad Potomac's Shore," "Excelsior," "With All thy Gifts," "To Rich Givers," "The Dalliance of the Eagles," "Tears," "After the Sea-Ship," "Aboard at a Ship's Helm," and "Thick-Sprinkled Bunting." "As Consequent, Etc. " was published first in 1881.



Whitman Archive Title: Autumn Rivulets
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00494
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Autumn Rivulets (1881). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A proof of "As Consequent, Etc.," with cancelled title. This proof is housed at the Library of Congress with another, similarly marked, proof of "As Consequent, Etc. " (Whitman Archive ID: loc.00181) and unmarked proofs of the following poems: "From Far Dakota's Cañons," "A Farm Picture," "What Best I See on Thee" (U.S. Grant), "The Sobbing of the Bells," "Italian Music in Dakota," "By Broad Potomac's Shore," "Excelsior," "With All thy Gifts," "To Rich Givers," "The Dalliance of the Eagles," "Tears," "After the Sea-Ship," "Aboard at a Ship's Helm," and "Thick-Sprinkled Bunting." "As Consequent, Etc. " was published first in 1881.



Whitman Archive Title: some threading Ohio's
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00082
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life

Whitman Archive Title: Bardic Symbols
Whitman Archive ID: har.00003
Repository: Harvard University: Manuscripts Department, Houghton Library
Repository ID: Autograph File
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: This is a partial, late draft, with minor revisions, of "Bardic Symbols," first published in the April 1860 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. The poem was later revised and published under the title "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life." Two of the manuscript leaves are stored with a letter to the editor, James Russell Lowell, dated October 2, 1861; the other leaf is stored separately.



Whitman Archive Title: Sea Winrows
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00033
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: between 1860 and 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A list of words probably related to the poem "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," originally published as "Bardic Symbols" in the Atlantic Monthly 5 (April 1860). The final version of the poem was published in Leaves of Grass (1881-82). The verso features the words "Sands and Drifts."


As I sail'd at

Whitman Archive Title: [As I sail'd at night alone]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00241
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Ontario's Shores. A.MS. draft.
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19.5 x 10 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A few lines on the verso of a cancelled letter (the correspondent and date are unknown), beginning "As I sail'd at night alone." The relationship of this draft to Whitman's published work is unknown. The title on the Library of Congress's folder comes from the final line of the draft ("As I wander Ontario's shores alone at night") and does not suggest that this draft is related to "By Blue Ontario's Shore."


As I Sit Writing Here

Whitman Archive Title: As I sit writing here
Whitman Archive ID: pri.00001
Repository: Princeton University Library: Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
Box: 22
Folder: 9
Date: 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft, with several corrections, of the four-line poem "As I Sit Writing Here," which was published first in the New York Herald, May 14, 1888. It was reprinted in November Boughs (1888) and in the "Sands at Seventy" annex of Leaves of Grass (1891–92).


As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days

Whitman Archive Title: Poem, as in a rapt and
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00287
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: before 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript proposing ideas for a poem in the form of a prophetic vision about the future of America. Possibly related to "As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days," which was first published as "Chants Democratic 21" in 1860–1861. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "An After Thought or Two," and "Poem ante-dating."


As if a Phantom Caress'd Me

Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


As in a Swoon

Whitman Archive Title: As in a Swoon
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00177
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: As In A Swoon. Proof.
Date: about 1876
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 x 12.5 cm, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A proof pasted on another sheet of paper, with seven words in Whitman's hand: "Walt Whitman, (discarded from last booklet.)" "As in a Swoon" was published first in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: As in a Swoon
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00004
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: between 1872 and 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a manuscript of the poem "As in a Swoon," first published in the 1876 printing of Leaves of Grass. Although this poem was not included in any subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass, Whitman did include it in the 1891 volume Good-Bye My Fancy, and as one of the few poems in the 1892 volume Complete Prose Works.


As now are given to

Whitman Archive Title: As now are given
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00508
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 38
Repository Title: Glimpses of Walt Whitman from 1877 to '87
Date: Between 1845 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A manuscript containing prose notes about science and the names of various scientific fields. Although Whitman was interested in sciene throughout his life, his most intense period of interest in the subject was during the late 1840s and 1850s. The small handwriting and small scrap of paper on which the note is written are also characteristic of Whitman's early writing (see Edward Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 5:1998). The manuscript was therefore likely written in the late 1840s or the 1850s. The manuscript is pasted down to a backing sheet, making the verso inaccessible.



Whitman Archive Title: Boccacio
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00511
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 38
Repository Title: Glimpses of Walt Whitman from 1877 to '87
Date: Between 1849 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A prose note about Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). According to Edward Grier, this scrap may have been part of a larger manuscript of notes about other Italian writers (see Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 5:1858). The text Whitman quotes comes from the Westminster Review, American Edition, LI, (July 1849): 187 (see Stovall, "Notes on Whitman's Reading," American Literature 26, no. 3, [November 1954]: 361). This manuscript could therefore date from as early as 1849, although it was most likely written in the 1850s. The manuscript is pasted down to a backing sheet, making the verso inaccessible.


As of Forms

Whitman Archive Title: As of Forms.
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00124
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Date: between 1856 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21.5 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript draft of the unpublished poem "As of Forms," which is possibly one of a group of poems Whitman composed prior to the third edition of Leaves of Grass.


As the Greek's Signal Flame

Whitman Archive Title: As the Greek's Signal Flame
Whitman Archive ID: hav.00001
Repository: Haverford College: Quaker and Special Collections
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: A broadside of Whitman's poem "As the Greek's Signal Flame," which is subtitled "For Whittier's 80th birthday, December 17, 1887." The poem was published first in 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: Occasional Pieces of Poetry
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03449
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: about 1887–1888
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 13, printed and handwritten
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Content: Whitman's copy of John G. C. Brainard's Occasional Pieces of Poetry (1825), many pages of which bear the poet's handwriting. Whitman appears to have used the volume as a notebook of sorts, for while some of the writing seems to be related to Brainard's text most of it does not. Among the handwritten notes are several sets of ideas for poems that were never published and phrases that also appear in Whitman's personal correspondence. Some of these are phrases that Whitman inscribed in the copy of Complete Poems & Prose (1888) that he gave to Horace Traubel. On other pages are words from his letter to Anne Gilchrist of November 11, 1871. These were perhaps copied into the Brainard volume as he worked to write a poem in Gilchrist's honor, though they did not make it into "Going Somewhere," the poetic tribute that Whitman published in the November 1887 issue of Lippincott's Magazine (without individual title, but in a group of four poems collectively labelled "November Boughs"). A draft of "Going Somewhere" appears elsewhere in this volume. Also present is a draft of "The Dismantled Ship," which was first published in the New York Herald on February 23, 1888. Both poems were later included in November Boughs (1888) and in subsequent printings of Leaves of Grass. Only those pages with Whitman's handwritten notes are linked from this record. For a more complete discussion of this item, see Nicole Gray, "Walt Whitman's Marginalia as Occasional Practice," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 107 (December 2013), 467–494.



Whitman Archive Title: As the Greek's Signal Flame
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00493
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: As The Greek's Signal Flame (1887). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12 x 15.25 cm, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: At the top of a proof of "As the Greek's Signal Flame" are nine words: "If convenient put in paper of Saturday Dec. 17."


As the Time Draws Nigh

Whitman Archive Title: Nearing Departure
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00231
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 16 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of a poem which Whitman titled "Nearing Departure." Whitman retitled the poem "To My Soul" when it was first published, in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. In 1867 Whitman cut eight lines and revised others, retitling the poem "As Nearing Departure" and moving it to an untitled group of poems in the supplement "Songs Before Parting." In 1872 it was finally retitled "As the Time Draws Nigh" and transferred to the cluster "Songs of Parting" within the main body of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: To the Future
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00008
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: To a common prostitute
Repository ID: HM 11205
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of a poem titled "To the Future." Although the poem was unpublished in its entirety, the seventh line was used in the poem "To My Soul," which was first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass and later retitled "As the Time Draws Nigh." On the reverse is a draft of "To a Common Prostitute."



Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, handwritten
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Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."



Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


As They Draw to a Close

Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


Ashes of Soldiers [poem]

Whitman Archive Title: Ashes of Roses
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00050
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Ashes of Roses. A.MS. drafts and notes.
Date: between 1868 and 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 23.5 x 13.5 and 10 x 13.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Poem draft, parts of which have been printed as "? Ashes of Roses." The manuscript may bear a relationship to "Ashes of Soldiers," a poem published first in 1865 as "Hymn of Dead Soldiers" in Drum-Taps. It was only in 1871 that Whitman added the imagery of ashes to this poem. The manuscript was likely composed around 1870-1871, when Whitman was revising and expanding the poem for republication. Alternatively, the manuscript may be a draft of a unique poetic work unpublished in Whitman's lifetime.



Whitman Archive Title: Ashes of heroes
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00054
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Beat! Beat! Drums! (1861). A. MS. draft.
Date: about 1870-1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Draft of lines which bear a relationship to "Ashes of Soldiers," first published in 1865. This manuscript was likely composed around 1870-1871, when Whitman was revising and expanding the poem for republication. This manuscript appears to be a draft of the first two linegroups of "Ashes of Soldiers." These linegroups were added in 1871 to a poem first published as "Hymn of Dead Soldiers" in Drum-Taps (1865). It was only in 1871 that he added the imagery of ashes to this poem.



Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


Assurances

Whitman Archive Title: [the scope of government]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00157
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 37
Folder: 1855-1856 (?), Government, Nature, Trial Lines, Self-Advice
Date: between 1855-1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 20 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984. 6 vols.), noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Assurances," "This Compost," and an unfinished poem entitled "The Insects. On some of the leaves Whitman has rotated the notebook and written upside down."


Authors at Home. VII. Walt Whitman at Camden

Whitman Archive Title: [more books]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03403
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: 18
Date: about 1885
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript draft fragment for an article that appeared under the title "Walt Whitman at Camden" in the February 28, 1885 issue of the Critic under the pseudonym George Selwyn. The article was the seventh in the magazine's "Authors at Home" series.


Authors of Washington, The

Whitman Archive Title: Washington as a Central Winter Residence
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00328
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Folder: 119
Date: 1871–1872
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript touches on the developing "distinctive metropolitan American Character" of Washington, including the city's status as a literary center. Portions of this manuscript were used in "Washington as a Central Winter Residence" and "Authors of Washington," the latter of which was published in two installments. The first installment appeared in the 6 January 1872 issue of the Washington Evening Star, which also included "Washington as a Central Winter Residence." The second installment was published in the 9 January 1872 issue of the same. For more details regarding how this manuscript contributed to these two pieces of journalism, see Martin G. Murray, "Two Pieces of Uncollected Whitman Journalism: 'Washington as a Central Winter Residence' and 'The Authors of Washington,'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 20 (Winter/Spring 2003), 151-176.


Autumn Side-Bits

Whitman Archive Title: [Sept 20 '76]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00038
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 51
Repository Title: Sept. 20 '76
Date: 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft fragment, portions of which Whitman first published in "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes. (No. 1)," The Critic 29 January 1881, under the heading "Autumn Scenes and Sights." Whitman used this portion of prose nearly unchanged in "Autumn Side-Bits," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). "Autumn Side-Bits" was eventually collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: ['76 White Horse]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00055
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 54
Repository Title: Cloudy and Coolish
Date: 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A Draft fragment of "Autumn Side-Bits," that first appeared in the 29 January 1881 issue of The Critic as part of "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes. (No. 1)," under the section heading "Autumn Scenes and Sights." Whitman further revised this prose piece before including it in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) as part of "Autumn Side-Bits," which was later collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [last of Sept. '76]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00036
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 52
Repository Title: The ground in all directions is stretched
Date: 1876–1877
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft paragraph describing Whitman's time at Timber Creek, where he spent some restorative time in the mid- to late-1870s. Much of this draft first appeared in the 29 January 1881 issue of The Critic, as part of "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes. (No. 1)," under the section heading "Autumn Scenes and Sights." This piece of prose was slightly revised and eventually published as "Autumn Side-Bits," in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) before appearing in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [and many an autumn sight]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00037
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 53
Repository Title: —and many an autumn sight
Date: 1876–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two scraps of paper pasted to a backing sheet to make one leaf. These scraps feature draft lines which appeared slightly revised in the 29 January 1881 issue of the The Critic as part of "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes. (No. 1)," under the section heading "Autumn Scenes and Sights." Whitman continued to revise this piece of prose, eventually publishing it as "Autumn Side-Bits," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883).


Back to ten thousand years

Whitman Archive Title: Back to ten thousand years
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00495
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 38
Repository Title: Glimpses of Walt Whitman from 1877 to '87
Date: Between 1847 and 1857
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A manuscript containing prose notes about the historical ubiquity of great men, "capable of deeds of might, blessings, poems, enlightenment," with the suggestion that these were introductory thoughts for a discussion of various religions. The writing contains no known connection to any of Whitman's published works. Edward Grier notes that writing on the verso would suggest that this manuscript "must have been written in 1857 or earlier" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2067). The manuscript is pasted down to a backing sheet, making the verso inaccessible.


Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads, A

Whitman Archive Title: [Why should I be afraid]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01075
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "Why Should I Be Afraid?" draft
Date: 1855-1892
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On the verso of what appears to be an incoming letter, Whitman states that he has "abandon'd the conventional themes." These comments were revised and published in "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads,", the essay that Whitman used to close the 1891–92 edition of Leaves of Grass. "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" first appeared in Lippincott's Magazine (January 1887), under the title "My Book and I." Reprinted in Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers (1888), "My Book and I" was also combined with "How I Made a Book," Philadelphia Press (11 July 1889) and "A Backward Glance on My Own Road," Critic (5 January 1884) and published as "A Backward Glance" in November Boughs (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: In forming the book
Whitman Archive ID: amh.00014
Repository: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Date: undated; between 1873 and 1889
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one side of the leaf is a heavily revised prose fragment in which Whitman claims that his literary project has been to craft poetry which, rather than exemplifying conventional notions of poetic form, offers a faithful record of the writer's life and milieu. The relationship of this draft to any one of Whitman's published works is uncertain, though it resembles passages in several, including "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" (1888) and "Note at End of Complete Poems and Prose" (1888). The other side of the leaf contains the last page of a letter to Whitman from James Matlack Scovel.



Whitman Archive Title: [Camden Notebook]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05506
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 3
Folder: [circa 1880], Camden (?) notebook
Date: 1879-1881
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 22 leaves, handwritten
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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: [Many consider the expressions]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01015
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "Expressions of Poetry," clipping with corrections
Date: 1884–1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two short clippings of Whitman's own prose, which have been pasted to a larger sheet and feature corrections in Whitman's hand. The printed text appeared uncorrected in the 5 January 1884 issue of the Critic with the title, "A Backward Glance on My Own Road." This essay was revised and included in Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers (1888) before parts of it were combined with two other pieces of journalism ("How I Made a Book," Philadelphia Press, 11 July 1886; "My Book and I," Lippincott's Magazine, January 1887) and published as "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" in November Boughs (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: How I made a book
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00148
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 43
Repository Title: How I made a book
Repository ID: #3829-f
Date: 1885-1886
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 34 leaves, handwritten, printed
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Content: This manuscript is a draft of the essay "How I Made a Book," published in the Philadelphia Press on July 11, 1886 and later included in Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers published in 1888. The manuscript also contains two clippings (with handwritten revisions) of the essay "A Backward Glance on My Own Road," published in the Critic on January 5, 1884. (This latter essay was revised and also included in Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers published in 1888). "How I Made a Book," "A Backward Glance on my Own Road" and "My Book and I" (which was published in Lippincott's Magazine on January 1887 and later included in Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers published in 1888) all contributed to form the essay "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" which was published in November Boughs in 1888 and later retained in the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: My Book and I
Whitman Archive ID: brl.00002
Repository: The British Library
Repository ID: Ashley MS 5133
Date: 1886 or 1887
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 22 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A late-stage draft, with printer's notes, of the essay "My Book and I," which was first published in Lippincott's in January 1887. Much of this essay would later appear, slightly altered, in "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," published in Whitman's November Boughs in 1888.



Whitman Archive Title: [One main]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03853
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: General Correspondence
Box: 16
Folder: Smith, Robert Pearsall
Date: about 1887
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Clipping, with handwritten revisions, of a passage from "A Backward Glance on My Own Road," which had been published in the January 5, 1884 issue of The Critic. This passage was incorporated into "My Book and I," which was first published in the January 1887 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. It was also retained when Whitman used these and two other earlier essays ("How 'Leaves of Grass' Was Made" and "How I Made a Book") to fashion "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," first published in November Boughs (1888) and reprinted in the so-called deathbed edition of 1891–1892. It is unclear whether this manuscript was created in the processes that produced "My Book and I" or if it dates from the later work to create "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads."



Whitman Archive Title: Drift Sands.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04183
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Drift Sands
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05999
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Notes and Flanges.—No. 1.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04235
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Ripple and echoes from the]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04236
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Drift Sands
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04240
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [To the liquid]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04285
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [WW's Nov. Boughs]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00272
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A one-page draft of a footnote for "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," which was first published in the so-called deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass in 1891. Although Whitman created the essay from several previously published pieces, the note inscribed on this manuscript had not appeared in print before.


ball-room was swept, The

Whitman Archive Title: [The ball-room was swept]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00011
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 2
Repository Title: The Ballroom was swept and the floor white…
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Three lines of a poem beginning "The ball-room was swept, and the floor white." The relationship between these lines and Whitman's published poetry is unknown. On the verso is a fragment of an apparent letter, which Edwin Haviland Miller dates August 1860, to Thayer and Eldridge, concerning their loan to Henry Clapp of $200.


Banjo Poem

Whitman Archive Title: Banjo Poem
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00290
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: 1845–1892
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Scrap with just two words, apparently a trial title. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Poem L'Envoy," "Poem [?The Cruise]," and "of Death—the song."


Base of All Metaphysics, The

Whitman Archive Title: The professor's answer
Whitman Archive ID: bpl.00023
Repository: Boston Public Library: The Walt Whitman Collection
Repository Title: The professor's answer
Repository ID: Whitman.13.5.A
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This early draft of a poem Whitman titled "The Professor's Answer" was tipped into a copy of John Burroughs's Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person between pages 16 and 17. This poem, ultimately titled "The Base of All Metaphysics," first appeared in print as an addition to the "Calamus" group in Leaves of Grass (1871).


Bathed in War's Perfume [poem]

Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


Beat! Beat! Drums!

Whitman Archive Title: [Poem of the Drum]
Whitman Archive ID: med.00732
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: about 1861
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: A brief note of twenty-seven words, sketching the idea for a poem "that shall be alive with the stirring and beating of a drum." The current location of this manuscript is unknown, and its contents are attested only by a transcription published by Richard Maurice Bucke in Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 179. Whitman's poetry contains many references to the beating of drums, so one cannot be certain which, if any, of the poems is related to this manuscript. The most likely candidate, however, is "Beat! Beat! Drums!" Whitman's only poem that not only mentions drums but treats them as its central subject. First published simultaneously in the 28 September 1861 issues of Harper's Weekly and the New York Leader, it later appeared in Drum-Taps (1865) and in subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Beat! beat! drums!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00051
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Beat! Beat! Drums! (1861). A. MS. draft.
Date: 1861
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript is a draft of the first stanza of the poem "Beat! Beat! Drums!" The poem was first published simultaneously in both Harper's Weekly and the New York Leader on September 28, 1861. On the reverse (loc.07461) are poetic lines on the death of Abraham Lincoln.


Beauty of the Ship, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Beauty of the Ship
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00499
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: General Correspondence
Box: 4
Folder: Buchanan, Robert. Apr. 1876-Jan 1877, & undated.
Date: 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: A cancelled, early draft of "The Beauty of the Ship"written on the verso of an 1876 letter from Whitman to Robert Buchanan.


Begin a Long Jaunt West

Whitman Archive Title: Trip to Kansas &c
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00081
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Repository Title: Begin a Long Jaunt West
Date: 1879–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: Notes with the heading, "Trip to Kansas &c," portions of which Whitman revised and used in "Begin a Long Jaunt West," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). The verso of this manuscript includes a miscellaneous list, which Whitman identifies as "travelers, merchants, Leadville folk."


Beginners

Whitman Archive Title: Beginners
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00006
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository ID: HM 11202
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: Complete draft, lightly revised, of "Beginners," a poem first published in Leaves of Grass (1860–61) and reprinted in all subsequent editons.


Bible as Poetry, The

Whitman Archive Title: [I suppose one can say]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00084
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 10
Repository Title: The Bible as Poetry
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1880-1883
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript is an early draft of the first part of the essay "The Bible as Poetry" published in the Critic on February 3, 1883 and then included, with the same title, in November Boughs, published in 1888 (later retained in the Complete Prose Works, published in 1892). On the verso is a letter from D.W. Zimmerman to Whitman, dated 13 January 1883.


Bill Guess

Whitman Archive Title: Bill Guess
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00887
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 5
Date: March 20, 1854
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript contains notes about the characters and physical traits of three men: Bill Guess, Peter [no last name given], and George Fitch. Whitman has dated the manuscript March 20th, 1854. Edward Grier notes that the name "Bill Guess" does not appear in New York directories from this time period. Two entries for "George Fitch" are listed in the New York City directory for 1855–56. One Fitch is listed as an expressman, and the other is listed as a clerk. Grier postulates that "the three young men mentioned here were probably itinerant omnibus drivers" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:199). On the reverse (duk.00051) is a manuscript draft related to what eventually became section 41 in the final version of "Song of Myself."


Birds, and a Caution

Whitman Archive Title: [May 16, 17]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00003
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 54
Repository Title: Birds—And a Caution
Date: 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A series of notes, dated 16–17 May 1881. The line which reads "the vocal shuttle of the whip-por-will" appeared nearly verbatim in "Birds—And a Caution, " Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). "Birds—And a Caution" later appeared in Complete Prose Works (1892). This manuscript bears similarities in phraseology with "Sunday morning," a manuscript held in the Feinberg collection at the Library of Congress, which may be a revised draft of this item.


Blacks Mrs Hannah Mores anecdote

Whitman Archive Title: [Blacks]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00374
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Body, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Body—
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00250
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 30
Date: 1850–1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Manuscript containing ideas for a poem about the body as something more than physical. An image for the verso is unavailable.


Books, as now produced

Whitman Archive Title: Books, as now produced
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00112
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: "[Notes on Literature] (in Frey)"
Date: Undated
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1594). Grier speculates that Richard Maurice Bucke, one of Whitman's literary executors, may have received this manuscript pinned together with several others on the same theme (4:1603). The manuscript is pasted down, so an image of the verso is unavailable.


Boston Common—More of Emerson

Whitman Archive Title: How I Still Get Around and Take Notes (No. 5)
Whitman Archive ID: buf.00002
Repository: University at Buffalo
Date: 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 24 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A complete draft, with corrections and notes to the printer, of "How I Still Get Around and Take Notes. (No. 5)," a piece of journalism that appeared in The Critic (Vol. I, no. 24) on December 3, 1881. Portions of the piece would later be reprinted as three separate sections of Specimen Days (1882–1883): "A Visit, at the Last, to R. W. Emerson," "Other Concord Notations," and "Boston Common—More of Emerson." The article was also reprinted, with small portions excised, in Alexander Ireland's 1882 volume In Memoriam. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Recollections of His Visits to England in 1833, 1847–8, 1872–3, and Extracts from Unpublished Letters (London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.), 113–115.


Bravo, Paris Exposition

Whitman Archive Title: Bravo, Paris Exposition!
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00082
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, proof with handwritten corrections
View images: 1
Content: "Bravo, Paris Exposition!" was published in Harper's Weekly 33, 28 September 1889. It was reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) and in Leaves of Grass (1891–1892). According to a letter from Whitman to R. M. Bucke, this poem was also reprinted in the French paper "Le Temps." This proof has been pasted down to a backing sheet, rendering the verso inaccessible.



Whitman Archive Title: Bravo, Paris Exhibition!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00057
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Bravo, Paris Exposition! (1889). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 27.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Signed draft of a poem with a variation in line 1 from the printed version. On the verso, written in pencil: "Can you use this? Put it under the "Personal" head like you did a year ago? "The price is $10, which please send me by mail here." In ink is the start of another sentence: "If you don't want it." The poem was published under the title "Bravo, Paris Exposition!" in 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: Bravo, Paris Exposition!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00058
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Bravo, Paris Exposition! (1889). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 11.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A proof sheet of "Bravo, Paris Exposition!" with corrections in Whitman's hand. "Bravo, Paris Exposition!" was published in 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: Bravo, Paris Exposition!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00059
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Bravo, Paris Exposition! (1889). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 11.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A proof sheet of "Bravo, Paris Exposition!" with corrections in Whitman's hand. "Bravo, Paris Exposition!" was published in 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: Bravo, Paris Exposition!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00060
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Bravo, Paris Exposition! (1889). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 11.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A proof sheet of "Bravo, Paris Exposition!" with corrections in Whitman's hand. At the top is a note reading "See notes, Oct 31, '89." "Bravo, Paris Exposition!" was published in 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: Bravo, Paris Exposition!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00061
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Bravo, Paris Exposition! (1889). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A proof sheet of "Bravo, Paris Exposition!" with corrections in Whitman's hand. At the top is a note in Traubel's hand: "Rec'd from W.W. Sept 30, '89". "Bravo, Paris Exposition!" was published in 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: Bravo, Paris Exhibition!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00056
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Bravo, Paris Exposition! (1889). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 27.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of the poem published as "Bravo, Paris Exposition!" in 1889, with a diagonal line striking through the entire page.


Breath and Spray

Whitman Archive Title: Breath and Spray
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00306
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 33
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: List of what appear to be possible titles for volumes or clusters of poems.


British Literature

Whitman Archive Title: cottonwood
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00601
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines in the manuscript are similar to lines in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The list of flora and fauna could anticipate any number of similar lists in Whitman's writing, but has perhaps the most words in common with a line in the prose preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. Poetic lines on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00254) also relate to lines in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."


Broadway

Whitman Archive Title: Broadway
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00156
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 13
Date: 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 22.5 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript contains a draft version of the poem "Broadway". A note appearing at the top of the page states "Sent Herald March 3—sent again April 9 '88" indicating that this manuscript was likely composed and/or edited around the time of its first publication in the New York Herald, April 10, 1888.


Broadway, 1861

Whitman Archive Title: Broadway, 1861.
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00004
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Box: Oversized (+).
Date: around 1861
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Lightly revised handwritten copy of a poem titled "Broadway, 1861," which is unrelated to the poem "Broadway" that Whitman published in the New York Herald in 1888. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley note the similarity of "Broadway, 1861" to the opening poem of Drum-Taps, "First O Songs for a Prelude, " particularly "in its theme of the arousing of the energies of the great city—and of the nation—to the war." They also note this similarity in the two poems composed on the reverse of this leaf, "I Too Am Drawn . . ." and "I Have Lived . . ."


Broadway Pageant, A

Whitman Archive Title: [You are English]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00277
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: 1856-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 10 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An early, partial draft of the poem eventually known as "A Broadway Pageant," first published in the June 27, 1860 issue of the New York Times as "The Errand-Bearers."


Brooklyn Soldier, and a Noble One, A

Whitman Archive Title: [Frank Butler was from Massachusetts]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00212
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 58
Date: 1864–1865
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman's notes on Frank Butler, an officer of the 51st New-York Veterans who died in action. Whitman wrote about Butler's death in "A Brooklyn Soldier, and a Noble One," which appeared in the 19 January 1865 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.



Whitman Archive Title: Brooklyn, Jan 19 & 20, 1865
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00152
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 56
Date: 1865
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman's response to learning of George Whitman's imprisonment at Danville during the Civil War. This manuscript contains much of the same information about George and his status as a prisoner of war that Whitman published in "A Brooklyn Soldier, and A Noble One," which appeared in the 19 January 1865 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Material in this manuscript also contributed to "The Fifty-first New-York Volunteers," published in the New-York Times, 24 January 1865 as well as portions of Memoranda During the War (1875–76).


Brooklyniana; A Series of Articles, on Past and Present. No. 10

Whitman Archive Title: The incident of the blowing up
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05317
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Brooklyniana; A Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present

Whitman Archive Title: In writing my history of Brooklyn
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04741
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: about 1862
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Brief note regarding some general aspects of style that Whitman intended to employ in "Brooklyniana; A Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present," which was published in the Brooklyn Standard between June 3, 1861 and November 1, 1862.


Brooklyniana; A Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present. No. 13.

Whitman Archive Title: [Brooklyn is ° latitude]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04740
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: about 1862
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably wrote these notes about Long Island's geographical dimensions and aboriginal name in the course of preparing material for "Brooklyniana; A Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present," which was published in the Brooklyn Standard between June 3, 1861 and November 1, 1862. Some of the information and phrases contained in this manuscript were included in the thirteenth installment, which appeared on March 1, 1862.


Brooklyniana; a Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present. No. 15

Whitman Archive Title: [I well remember Lafayette's laying]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01027
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "Lafayette in Brooklyn," draft
Date: about 1862
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes on the Apprentice's Library in Brooklyn. Whitman published a short history of the Apprentice's Library in "Brooklyniana: A Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present No. 15.," which first appeared in the issue of the Brooklyn Standard.


Brooklyniana; A Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present. No. 16

Whitman Archive Title: Hist Brooklyn
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00963
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 35
Folder: "Brooklyniana: History of Brooklyn and Long Island," drafts and notes
Date: about 1862
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: There is no known connection between the recto of this manuscript—treating Washington's visit to Brooklyn in the 1790s—and Whitman's published work. The verso of this manuscript contains cancelled notes on the establishment of the Hudson Avenue Hospital in the mid-1840s. Whitman wrote about the Hudson Avenue Hospital in "Brooklyniana. A Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present. No. 16," which appeared in the 29 March 1862 issue of the Brooklyn Standard. Though there are no direct textual links between the two, it is likely that these notes contributed to this piece of journalism.


Brooklyniana; A Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present. No. 2

Whitman Archive Title: Hendrik Hudson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00952
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 35
Folder: "Brooklyniana: History of Brooklyn and Long Island," drafts and notes
Date: 1855–1861
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes on Hendrick Hudson that appear to have contributed to "Brooklyniana: A Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present. No. 2," Daily Standard (5 June 1861).


Brooklyniana; A Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present. No. 3 [Among the few relics left]

Whitman Archive Title: Talk with Mr. Hartshorn
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07017
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Notes 1847–1891, Brooklyniana, undated, Guy's picture of Brooklyn
Date: 1855-1861
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3
Content: These notes discuss the authenticity of a painting by Francis Guy. Whitman wrote about Guy and one of his paintings in the installment of his "Brooklyniana" series published in the Brooklyn Standard on 28 December 1861. The piece is titled "Brooklyniana No. 3," but was actually the fourth installment to appear; an installment also titled "No. 3" had appeared in the Standard on 12 June 1861.


Brooklyniana; A Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present. No. 4

Whitman Archive Title: [Here the aboriginal money circulated]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00962
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 35
Folder: "Brooklyniana: History of Brooklyn and Long Island," drafts and notes
Date: about 1861
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes on the "aboriginal money" Whitman identifies as the "Seawan, or Seawant." Whitman wrote about this currency in the fourth installment of Brooklyniana, which appeared in the 28 December 1861 issue of the Brooklyn Standard. For more on how this manuscript may have contributed to this piece of journalism, see Kimberly Winschel Banion, "'These terrible 30 or 40 hours': Washington at the Battle of Brooklyn in Whitman's 'The Sleepers' and 'Brooklyniana' Manuscripts," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 27 (Spring 2010), 193-212.


Brooklyniana; a Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present. No. 8

Whitman Archive Title: Brooklyn theatres
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04742
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: about 1862
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two paragraphs, lightly corrected, about the first theater building in Brooklyn. Whitman used this material in the eighth installment of "Brooklyniana; A Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present." This series was published in the Brooklyn Standard between June 3, 1861 and November 1, 1862. "Brooklyniana, No. 8" appeared on January 25, 1862.


Brooklyniana; A Series of Local Articles, on Past and Present. No. 9.

Whitman Archive Title: A Sermon Preached in the Central Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, Brooklyn, on Sabbath Morning, the 27th Day of July, 1851
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03784
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Miscellany
Box: 48
Folder: 13
Date: 1851 and about 1862
Genre: prose
Physical Description: , handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
Content: Whitman's copy of this booklet, published in 1851, with handwritten annotations on several pages. The longest of these notes, which appears on p. 2 of the appendix, constitutes a draft of a passage that Whitman incorporated into the ninth number of his "Brooklyniana" series, which was published in the Brooklyn Standard on February 1, 1862. Only those pages bearing Whitman's annotations are currently linked from this record.


But when a voice in

Whitman Archive Title: But when a voice in our hearing
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01018
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 32
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript discusses the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and issues of state sovereignty. It was probably written not long after the law's passage, likely between 1850 and 1855.


By Blue Ontario's Shore

Whitman Archive Title: The new theologies bring forward
Whitman Archive ID: med.00746
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: This manuscript, known only from a transcription published by Clifton Joseph Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts (Harvard University Press, 1928), 43, includes lines that appeared, in a slightly altered form, in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and later in the poem eventually titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves as "Poem of Many in One." The date of the manuscript is therefore probably before or early in 1855.



Whitman Archive Title: (Of the great poet)
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00128
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 69
Date: About 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: This manuscript includes notes that anticipate the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Images and phrases in the second paragraph of the first leaf are reminscent of lines in both the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself" and the poem eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric." Another line on the first leaf appeared in a slightly different form in "Poem of The Singers, and of The Words of Poems" in the 1856 edition of Leaves (a poem later titled "Song of the Answerer"). The stated desire for "satisfiers" and "lovers" (found here on the bottom of the second leaf) appears in "Poem of Many in One," also first published in the 1856 edition and later titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore."



Whitman Archive Title: Health does not tell any
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00789
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Date: Before or early in 1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This prose manuscript includes the line "Which is the poem or any book that is not diseased?" which appeared in a slightly altered form in "Poem of Many in One" in 1856. The poem, eventually titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore," was retained through subsequent editions of Leaves, although the line was dropped after 1860–1861.



Whitman Archive Title: [after all]
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00001
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 50
Date: between about 1855 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is written on a green sheet used for the endpapers of the first edition of the Leaves of Grass (1855), an edition that begins with a ten-page statement in prose, originally untitled and later known generally as the 1855 Preface. This manuscript seems to represent an early attempt by Whitman to recast the 1855 prose Preface into poetry. The 1860–61 edition of Leaves of Grass introduced two new poems created in this way: "Poem of Many in One" (later "By Blue Ontario's Shore") and "Poem of the Last Explanation of Prudence" (later "Song of Prudence"). Neither of the published poems incorporates lines from this manuscript, though it and "Song of Prudence" are drawn from adjacent portions of the 1855 Preface.



Whitman Archive Title: Europe
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00304
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 16 x 14 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The recto notes represent an early stage of lines partially incorporated in "Poem of Salutation," the new third poem in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, which was permanently retitled "Salut au Monde!" in the 1860 edition. If the note or title "Europe" suggests that Whitman might have first intended to divide his salutations into discrete sections based on the different continents, this is a plan he did not follow in the published version(s). The more polished (but deleted) lines on the verso represent a recasting in poetic form of several lines from the 1855 Preface. These were further revised for the 1856 "Poem of Many in One," after which the first verse drafted on this page (cut off here, and beginning "over the Texan, Mexican, Florid[ian,]/ Cuban seas...") was dropped. The two verses below this, however, were preserved relatively unchanged through the poem's many transformations until the text was essentially fixed under the title "By Blue Ontario's Shore" in 1881.



Whitman Archive Title: [Have I]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00284
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: about 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 9 x 18 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The words "Have I" at the beginning are inscribed on a small scrap of the same paper, which Whitman pasted over some deleted words in the upper right corner that cannot be discerned through the paper. Inscribed and extensively revised in pencil, these verses were part of a larger set of lines before Whitman cut away the rest. Although the page number and many words on the left side of the proof have been cut away, the remaining words identify it as being from the "Poem of Many in One (1856)," which eventually became "By Blue Ontario's Shore." These unused but also undeleted lines may have been intended for that poem or a number of other poems in Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: are you and me
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00221
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 57
Date: 1855 or 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Most of the lines in this manuscript amount to a poetic rendering of sentences and phrases drawn from the prose preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and constitute a partial draft of the 1856 poem "Poem of Many In One," which eventually became "By Blue Ontario's Shore." The line at the bottom of this manuscript, partially cut away, was also drawn from the 1855 preface but was used in the 1856 poem "Liberty Poem for Asia, Africa, Europe, America, Australia, Cuba, and the Archipelagoes of The Sea," which Whitman titled, in its final version, "To a Foil'd European Revolutionaire." Draft lines on the back of this manuscript (upa.00005) also relate to the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: [med Cophósis]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00005
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, Before 1855, Women
Date: Between 1852 and 1854
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These pages were written by Whitman in the early to mid-1850s. William White described the pages as "torn from a tall notebook" (Daybooks and Notebooks [New York: New York University Press, 1978], 773–777). White noted a relationship between these pages and the poems "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Song of the Answerer," and "There Was a Child Went Forth." Some of the ideas and language being worked out here also appear in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." For a discussion of the dating and importance of this notebook, see Matt Miller, Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 11–16.



Whitman Archive Title: A nation announcing itself
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00030
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 14
Date: 1855 or 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript draft of the opening passage of "Poem of Many in One," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. The final title of the poem, "By Blue Ontario's Shore," first appeared in the 1881/1882 edition of Leaves. The reverse side of this leaf (duk.00886) contains both prose and verse that appears to be a draft of "Salut Au Monde!"



Whitman Archive Title: [George Walker]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00143
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 37
Folder: 1855-1856, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry trial lines
Date: between 1855-1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 45 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
Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:226–243, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Starting from Paumanok," "A Song for Occupations," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Salut au Monde!," "To One Shortly to Die," and "A Woman Waits for Me."



Whitman Archive Title: Inscription
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00060
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 46
Repository ID: #3829
Date: between 1855 and 1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript entitled "Inscription" appears to be a revision of other "Inscriptions" Whitman gathered in a notebook, along with prose drafts for a never-finished introduction to Leaves of Grass, and attached to his copy of the 1855 paper-bound edition. (The entire collection of draft "inscription" and introductory material is currently housed at the New York Public Library.) In the 1867 Leaves of Grass Whitman culled material from this poem and the other "Inscription" poems to create an italicized "Inscription" that he placed before "Starting from Paumanok" at the beginning of the book; in that edition he also transferred part of verse 2 to "As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario's Shore" (later the line was dropped and the title was revised to "By Blue Ontario's Shore"). From 1872 onward, this poem, revised and retitled "One's-Self I Sing," was printed as the first of several poems in the "Inscriptions" cluster that opened the book. In the 1888 November Boughs, however, Whitman reprinted the 1867 version as "Small the Theme of my Chant." Note: This manuscript draft may have been written before the Civil War, since it does not include the 1867 line "My Days I sing, and the Lands—with interstice I knew / of hapless War."



Whitman Archive Title: Produce great persons and the producers
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00166
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 51
Date: 1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten, print
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Content: Manuscript and clipping. On one side of the manuscript leaf (see the first image linked above) are several prose notes, including two versions of a paragraph that was later revised to become a line in "Poem of Many In One," published in Leaves of Grass (1856), and eventually titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore." The phrase "savage and luxuriant," which appears toward the bottom of this side, was used in Whitman's open letter to Emerson, published in an appendix to the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. On the other side of the leaf is a partial draft of "Poem of The Singers, and of the Words of Poems," also first published in 1856. In the final edition of Leaves of Grass this and another poem, which had been included in every edition since 1855, were combined to form "Song of the Answerer." Whitman pasted at least two newspaper clippings on the manuscript, one on each side. However, markings on both sides of the leaf indicate that Whitman potentially pasted a third, unidentified, newspaper clipping on this manuscript. One of these, which had covered Whitman's paragraphs but has since been detached, is included in the file; another is still pasted to the manuscript.


By Broad Potomac's Shore

Whitman Archive Title: [for 'Again old heart so gay']
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00619
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, 1871, Again Old Heart.
Date: 1872
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Two pages of notes for a piece entitled "Again old heart so gay" about "the idea of constantly recurring Birth and Death." This manuscript is probably related to "By Broad Potomac's Shore," first published in 1872.


By Emerson's Grave

Whitman Archive Title: By Emerson's Grave
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00198
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 2
Repository Title: By Emerson's Grave,
Date: 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: Three-page printer's copy of the essay "By Emerson's Grave," published in the May 6, 1882, issue of the Critic and later reprinted in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and Complete Prose Works (1892). The envelope in which Whitman sent the manuscript to the paper's editors is also included.


By That Long Scan of Waves

Whitman Archive Title: [You neighboring surf—]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00357
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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 strange the scenes]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04148
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Ephemeral scenes]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04151
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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."


By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame

Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman. 1862.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00026
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


By the Roadside

Whitman Archive Title: Summer Rivulets
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05635
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Calamus

Whitman Archive Title: [Breast Sorrel]
Whitman Archive ID: med.00775
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: before 1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: A brief list, which Grier suggests could be trial titles for "Calamus.". However, this manuscript is specifically suggestive of "Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone," in which Whitman writes about "Breast-sorrel and pinks of love"—both phrases which can be linked to this manuscript. First published as "Calamus. 13" in Leaves of Grass (1860), this poem appeared in later editions of Leaves of Grass as "Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone", and with slight changes in the text. This manuscript is known only from a transcription published by Richard Maurice Bucke in Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 164.



Whitman Archive Title: Premonition
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00179
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
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
Content: Thirty-three manuscript leaves numbered consecutively by Whitman in the lower left corner. "Premonition" was published as the introductory poem to the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass under the title "Proto-Leaf." In the 1867 and later editions it appeared directly after the opening poem "Inscription" as "Starting from Paumanok." On the verso of leaf 15 and part of leaf 16 appears a draft of what would become section 11 of "Calamus" in the 1860 Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: [These I, singing in spring]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00330
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, 20 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These leaves comprise four sections of a poem inscribed on the first and third sides of two folded half-sheets (20 x 16 cm) of the same white wove paper used for 1:3:1 and 1:3:2, in the same light brown ink and, like them, with only minor revisions. The pages were folded and pinned together to form a small pamphlet. Pinholes mostly at center-top and in what was the left margin of the pamphlet. The lines on page 1 became verses 1-8 of section 4 of "Calamus." in 1860; page 2 ("Solitary, smelling the earthy/ smell,...") became verses 9-14; page 3 ("Here lilac with a branch of/ pine,") became verses 15-22; and page 4 ("And stems of currants, and/ plum-blows,") became verses 23-28. From 1867 on the poem was titled "These I, Singing in Spring."



Whitman Archive Title: [Long I thought that knowledge]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00321
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, leaves 1 and 2 15 x 9.5 cm; leaf 3 6.5 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: On three pieces of white wove paper (the first two 15 x 9.5 cm, the third 6.5 x 9.5 cm), in black ink, with revisions in the same ink and in pencil. Whitman also penciled in the numbers 7, 8, and 8 1/2 in the lower-left corner of each page. Pinholes at the head and in the center of each page. This was the fifth poem of the original sequence "Live Oak, with Moss"; the poem number is inscribed ornamentally, as with the Roman numerals Whitman used for other "Live Oak" poems, and a wavy line appears after the last verse. The lines on the first leaf became verses 1-5 of section 8 of "Calamus" in 1860; the second leaf's lines ("Take notice, you Kanuck woods") became verses 6-10; and the lines on the half-page ("I am indifferent to my own/ songs—") became verses 11-12. There were no further appearances of this poem during the poet's lifetime, Whitman having canceled it in his "Blue Book Copy" of the 1860 Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: [Hours continuing long]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00314
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, leaf 1 9.5 x 9 cm; leaf 2 14.5 x 9 cm pasted to 5 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two pieces of white wove paper, the first cut down to 9.5 x 9 cm and the second comprising two sections (14.5 x 9 and 5 x 9.5 cm) joined by means of a strip of pink paper. In brown-black ink, with revisions in the same ink and in pencil. Pinholes mostly at top and in center of leaves. Whitman penciled in the numbers 11 and 12 (apparently over other numbers) in the lower-left corner of each page; his partly erased pencil note "(finished in/ the other city)" appears on the first page. The ornamental number "VIII" replaces a deleted ornamental "IX" on the first page, and the top of another "IX" appears at the foot of the second page, beneath a wavy line indicating the end of the poem. Whitman removed the lower section of page 2 from the top of current leaf 1:3:33 ("I dreamed in a dream of a/ city..."). This poem, the eighth in the sequence "Live Oak, with Moss," became section 9 of "Calamus" in 1860. This was its only appearance in Leaves. The first page contains what would become verses 1-3 in 1860, and the second ("Hours discouraged, distracted,") contains lines 4-12.



Whitman Archive Title: [You bards of ages hence]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00340
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, leaf 1 8 x 9 cm; leaf 2 14.5 x 9.5 cm pasted to 5.5 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two sections of white wove paper, the first cut down to 8 x 9 cm and the second a composite of two pieces pasted together, the top measuring 14.5 x 9.5 and the bottom 5.5 x 9.5 cm. In black ink, with a few revisions in the same ink. Pinholes at top and in center of both pages. Whitman numbered the first 9 1/2 and the second 10, in pencil, in the lower-left corner of each leaf. The Roman numeral is inscribed in an ornamental style, and the poem terminates with a wavy line. The seventh poem in the sequence "Live Oak, with Moss," became section 10 of "Calamus" in 1860 and was permanently retitled "Recorders Ages Hence" in 1867. The lines on the first page correspond to verses 1-3 of the 1860 version, and those on the second page ("Publish my name and hang up/ my picture...") to lines 4-11.



Whitman Archive Title: [When I heard at the close of]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00339
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 15 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two leaves of white wove paper, both measuring 15 x 9.5 cm; the lower half of the second page is pasted over with a section of white paper (8 x 9 cm) containing four revised verses. In black ink, with revisions in the same ink and in pencil. Pinholes mostly at top of both pages. Whitman numbered the pages 4 and 5, in pencil, in their lower-left corners. The third section of "Live Oak, with Moss" (with ornamental Roman numeral), this poem became section 11 of "Calamus" in 1860 and was permanently retitled "When I Heard at the Close of the Day" in 1867. For an earlier draft of the poem numbered V please see the verso of leaves 15-16 of "Premonition" (1:1:15-16). Bowers (p. 88) supplies the three earlier lines concealed by the paste-on revision to the second leaf. The lines on the first page correspond to verses 1-5 of the 1860 version, and those on the second page ("And when I thought how/ my friend,...") to lines 6-13.



Whitman Archive Title: To a new personal admirer
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00332
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, leaf 1 13 x 11.5 cm; leaf 2 20 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two pieces of white wove paper, 13 x 11.5 and 20 x 16 cm, in brown-black ink, with substantial revisions in the same ink. Pinholes mostly at center and in left margins of both pages. This poem, featuring a new first line, became section 12 of "Calamus" in 1860; in 1867 Whitman dropped the last 2 1/2 lines and permanently retitled it "Are you the New Person Drawn Toward Me?" The first page contains verses corresponding to lines 2-3 of the 1860 version, and the lines on the second page ("Do you suppose you can easily/ be my lover,...") became verses 4-11.



Whitman Archive Title: Buds
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00308
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On pink leaf (21.5 x 13 cm), in black ink, with minor revisions in the same ink. A few pinholes at top and near center. A pencil question mark appears in parentheses in the upper-right corner. The number 52 appears to have been revised from 51. After adding several verses, Whitman designated this poem section 13 of "Calamus" in the 1860 Leaves, and, after dropping the first two and last three lines of the 1860 version, permanently retitled it "Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone" in 1867.



Whitman Archive Title: Calamus-Leaves
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00310
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 9 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On white wove leaf, 15 x 9 cm, in black ink, with the title "Live Oak, with Moss" stricken out and "Calamus-Leaves" added in light brown ink, and with one small revision in blue pencil. Whitman numbered this page 1 in pencil. The first section of the original sequence "Live Oak, with Moss," this became section 14 of "Calamus" in 1860 and was permanently retitled "Not Heat Flames up and Consumes" in the 1867 Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: [I saw in Louisiana a]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00316
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 15 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On two leaves of white wove paper, both 15 x 9.5 cm, in black ink, with extensive revisions in the same ink, in light brown ink, and in pencil. Pinholes mostly at top and in center of both pages. Whitman numbered the pages 2 and 3 in pencil. This was originally the second section of the sequence "Live Oak, with Moss" (one of the deleted lines reads "I write/ these pieces, and name/ them after it [the Louisiana live-oak];"), with ornamental Roman numeral. It became section 20 of "Calamus" in 1860; the lines on the first manuscript page correspond to verses 1-7, and those on the second ("It is not needed to remind/ me...") to verses 8-13. The poem was retitled "I saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" in 1867.



Whitman Archive Title: As of Eternity
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00307
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two leaves of pink paper, both 21 x 13 cm, in black ink, with minor revisions in the same ink. Pinholes mostly in center and at top of both pages. This poem became section 21 of "Calamus" in 1860; the lines on the first manuscript page became verses 1-6, and those on the second ("I hear not the volumes of/ sound merely—...") became 7-9. Retitled "That Music Always Round Me" in 1867, it was transferred in 1871 to the "Whispers of Heavenly Death" cluster in Passage to India. In 1881 Whitman incorporated it, with the rest of the cluster, in the main body of Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: To A Stranger
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00334
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two leaves of pink paper, both 21 x 13 cm, in black ink, with revisions in the same ink and in light ink. Pinholes mostly in center and in left margin of each page. This poem was first numbered 94, and the first word was "Stranger"; Whitman penciled in a question mark, in parentheses, next to the title. It was numbered section 22 of "Calamus" in 1860: the lines on the first page correspond to verses 1-6 of the 1860 version, and those on the second ("You give me the pleasure") to verses 7-10. Whitman reintroduced the title "To a Stranger" in the 1867 Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: [This moment as I sit alone]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00331
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper, in dark brown ink, with revisions in pencil. Pinholes in center and at top. Whitman penciled in the number 6 in the lower-left corner. The fourth poem in the original sequence "Live Oak, with Moss" (with ornamental Roman numeral), it became section 23 of "Calamus" in 1860 and was permanently retitled "This Moment, Yearning and Thoughtful" in 1867.



Whitman Archive Title: Prairie-Grass
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00326
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of pink paper (21 x 13 cm), in black ink, with revisions in an even blacker ink and in pencil. Pinholes in center. The poem was originally numbered 53. In 1860 Whitman designated it section 25 of "Calamus," transforming the title into a new first line and expanding the original first line into verses 2-4. In 1867 he further revised it, permanently retitling it "The Prairie-Grass Dividing."



Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [O dying! Always dying!]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00319
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21.5 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one light blue Williamsburgh tax blank (21.5 x 12 cm), in dark brown ink, with revisions in fine pen and pencil. Whitman penciled in a question mark, in parentheses, next to the title. With the addition of the new first line "O love!" this became section 27 of "Calamus" in 1860. In the 1867 Leaves it was retitled "O Living Always—Always Dying!" Whitman next transferred it to the "Passage to India" supplement bound in with Leaves, where it reappeared in 1876; in the 1881 Leaves Whitman permanently added it to the cluster "Whispers of Heavenly Death."



Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [A promise to Indiana]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00318
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 22 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of pink paper (22 x 13 cm), in black ink, with revisions in the same ink. Pinholes mostly in center. The original title was "Leaflet," and the original number seems to have been 70. After substantial revision (including the addition of the new first line "A promise and gift to California,") this poem became section 30 of "Calamus" in 1860. Whitman further revised the poem before including it, permanently retitled "A Promise to California," in the 1867 Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [What place is besieged]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00320
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of pink paper (21.5 x 13 cm), in black ink, with a fair copy of the poem at the bottom of the leaf and a deleted draft featuring heavy revisions in the same ink and in pencil at the top. This poem was originally numbered 68, and its title was "Leaflet—." In 1860 it became the second numbered verse paragraph of section 31 of "Calamus." In 1867 Whitman split up the two paragraphs and made them separate poems; these verses were moved to a position between the "Calamus" and a "Leaves of Grass" cluster and permanently retitled "What Place Is Besieged?" In 1881 the poem was transferred to the cluster "Inscriptions."



Whitman Archive Title: [Here the frailest leaves of me]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00313
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper (15 x 9.5 cm), in medium-brown ink, with one revision in the same ink. Pinholes mostly at top and in center. The two sets of verses are divided by a short horizontal line. In 1860 the first set, with the addition of a new first line ("Here my last words, and the most baffling,") became section 44 of "Calamus"; the poem was permanently retitled "Here the Frailest Leaves of Me", and the new first line dropped, in 1867. The second set was revised to form section 38 of "Calamus" in 1860; in 1867 it was further revised and retitled "Fast Anchor'd, Eternal, O Love."



Whitman Archive Title: [A leaf for hand-in-hand]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00306
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14.5 x 9 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper (14.5 x 9 cm), in black ink, with revisions in pencil. Pinholes in center and at top. A blue-pencil number 3 appears in the upper right corner over an erased 9. With substantial additions and revisions this evolved into section 37 of "Calamus" in 1860; after further revision it became "A Leaf for Hand in Hand" in 1867.



Whitman Archive Title: [Earth]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00312
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14.5 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper (14.5 x 9.5 cm), in brown-black ink, with revisions in lighter ink (including the deletion, undone in 1860, of the phrase "My likeness!" after "Earth!"). Pinholes mostly at top and in center. Whitman penciled in the number 15 in the lower-left corner. Originally poem XI in the sequence "Live Oak, with Moss" (with the Roman numeral ornamentally drawn), this was revised to become section 36 of "Calamus" in 1860. In 1867 Whitman retitled the poem "Earth! My Likeness!"



Whitman Archive Title: [I dreamed in a dream of a]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00315
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 9.5 x 9 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper cut down to 9.5 x 9 cm, in brown-black ink, with revisions in pencil. Pinholes at top and in center. Whitman numbered the leaf 13, in pencil, in the lower-left corner. The excised top portion of the leaf became the bottom section of page 2 of 1:3:11, the poem (eighth in the sequence "Live Oak, with Moss") beginning "Hours continuing long, sore/ and heavy-hearted..." In 1860 this poem was substantially revised to form section 34 of "Calamus"; in 1867 it was retitled "I Dreamed in a Dream."



Whitman Archive Title: [What think you I have]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00338
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8.5 x 9 cm pasted to 6.5 x 9 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On a composite leaf of white wove paper consisting of two sections (8.5 x 9 and 6.5 x 9 cm) pasted together. Both sections are in black ink but, as Bowers notes, the lower verses were inscribed using a darker, thicker pen; the upper section is unrevised, but the lower section bears several alterations in the original ink. Pinholes at top of both sections and in the current center. Whitman numbered the page 9, in pencil, in the lower-left corner. Originally the sixth section of the sequence "Live Oak, with Moss," this poem was revised to form section 32 of "Calamus" in 1860, and in 1867 was retitled "What Think You I Take My Pen in Hand?"



Whitman Archive Title: [Sometimes]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00328
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper (15 x 9.5 cm), in light brown ink, with one revision in the same ink. Pinholes at top and in center. A blue pencil mark, possibly the number 4, has been inscribed in the upper right corner. Bowers notes that the page bears the imprint of a papermaker's lozenge die, perhaps that of Platner and Smith of Lee, Massachusetts. This poem became section 39 of "Calamus" in 1860; in 1867 Whitman replaced the third line with a new one and permanently retitled the poem "Sometimes with One I Love."



Whitman Archive Title: [To the young man]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00337
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 9 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper (15 x 9 cm), in black ink, with revisions in the same ink and in pencil. Whitman also penciled in the page number 16 in the lower-left corner. Pinholes in center and at top. This page bears the same papermaker's mark as 1:3:35. Twelfth in the original sequence "Live Oak, with Moss" (with ornamental Roman numeral), it became section 42 of "Calamus" in 1860. In 1867 Whitman changed the poem to an apostrophe, adding the first line "O Boy of the West!" (later removed) and permanently retitling it "To a Western Boy."



Whitman Archive Title: To One Who Will Understand
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00336
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
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Content: On one leaf of pink paper (21.5 x 13 cm), in black ink, with revisions in the same ink, in pencil, and in fine ink (in that order). Pinholes mostly in center. Originally titled "To Those Who Will Understand" and numbered 100 (then 101, then the current ?100 in the fine pen). This was revised to form section 41 of "Calamus" in 1860 and was permanently retitled "Among the Multitude" in the 1867 Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: [O you whom I often and silently come where you are]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00324
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14.5 x 9 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper (14.5 x 9 cm), in brown-black ink, with revisions in the same ink. Pinholes mostly at the top, with a few lower down. The tenth section of the original sequence "Live Oak, with Moss" (with ornamental Roman numeral), this was reformatted and renumbered but otherwise left unrevised as section 43 of "Calamus" in 1860. In 1867 Whitman permanently retitled it "O You Whom I Often and Silently Come."



Whitman Archive Title: [That shadow]
Whitman Archive ID:
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 17 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: One one leaf of lined light blue wove paper (17 x 9.5 cm), in pencil, with one pencil revision. Only two sets of pinholes, both in center. This was revised to become section 40 of "Calamus" in 1860; in 1867 it was retitled "That Shadow, My Likeness."



Whitman Archive Title: To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00335
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 10 x 13 cm pasted to 11.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
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Content: On one composite leaf of pink paper formed of two sections (10 x 13 and 11.5 x 13 cm) of the same page cut apart and pasted together in a new order. The poem number was originally 101 and then changed to 102; this number was deleted and the current ?101 added in fine pen. Bowers explains that the poem, in two discrete verse sections and inscribed in black ink (with title), originally occupied one full side of this leaf. When Whitman wanted to expand the first section without having to retranscribe the second one, he simply cut the two sections apart, flipped the first section over (turning it upside-down in the process), pasted the second section to the lower edge of the verso of the first section, and wrote his new first section (beginning "Throwing far, throwing over the head/ of death" and incorporating the original title as verse 3) in the blank space now created above the second section. The new first section is written and revised in light ink. As Bradley and Blodgett observe, the words "thirty-eight years old the/ eighty-first year of The States" indicate that Whitman composed the poem in 1857; these were revised to read "I, forty years old the Eighty-third Year of The States" in the 1860 Leaves, in which this poem constituted section 45 of "Calamus." In 1867 Whitman retitled the poem "Full of Life, Now."



Whitman Archive Title: [Full of wickedness]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00267
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15.5 x 8 cm, handwritten
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Content: The verses on the recto, while not published word-for-word until 1897, seem to represent an early draft of the poem first published as number 13 of the cluster "Leaves of Grass" in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, and eventually titled "You Felons on Trial in Courts." Whitman's careful script and verse forms here also resemble the methods of inscription used for the "Live Oak, with Moss" poems dated to the post-1856, pre-1860 period. The undeleted notes on the back are titled "Poems". A cartoon hand in the left margin points to the phrase "religious emotions." Whitman's use of the title "Calamus Leaves" dates these notes to the same pre-1860 period as the deleted verses on the recto, since "Calamus-Leaves" was what he renamed the cluster "Live Oak, with Moss" before settling on "Calamus" for the 1860 edition. A section of the notes below the rest (beginning "spirituality—the unknown,...") is inscribed in verse form.


Camps of Green

Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 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
Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


Carlyle from American Points of View

Whitman Archive Title: There is that
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00809
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Date: 1860-1870
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: A small scrap of prose that would make its way into a footnote for "Carlyle From American Points of View," which was first printed in Specimen Days (1882-1883). Although Edward Grier states that the handwriting on the scrap indicates a date in the 1860s, the essay was not published until its inclusion in Specimen Days.



Whitman Archive Title: Carlyle from American points of View
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00034
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Carlyle from American points of view
Repository ID: HM 138
Date: 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 37 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A draft of Whitman's essay "Carlyle from American Points of View," first published in Specimen Days in 1882. At the top of the draft, Whitman indicates that the piece was originally submitted for publication in the North American Review on 20 May 1882, but was rejected.


Carol Closing Sixty-Nine, A

Whitman Archive Title: Carols at nearing Seventy
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00158
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 16
Date: around 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 cm x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a draft version of a poem appearing with two alternative titles: "Carols at Nearing Seventy" and "Carols Closing Sixty-Nine". A note at bottom states "Sent to Lippincotts." The poem was first published with the title in the New York Herald, May 21, 1888. In the same year, this poem appears in the annex Sands at Seventy under the title "A Carol Closing Sixty-nine".



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age's Lambent Peaks
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00233
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age's Lambent Peaks (1888). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 33 x 15 cm; envelope 10.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An edited proof sheet with three poems: "Old Age's Lambent Peaks," "A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine," "To Get the Final Lilt of Songs," all published first in 1888. In addition to corrections, Whitman has written a note to the printer at the top of the page. Also included is an envelope with "printer's proofs, short poems, Walt Whitman, 1888, (autographic)" written on it.



Whitman Archive Title: [Carols at Seventy]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00016
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine (1888). Proof Sheets and note.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19.5 x 24 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Several trial titles for "A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine," first published in the New York Herald on 21 May 1888 and reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass the same year.



Whitman Archive Title: A Carol-Cluster at 69
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00157
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 15
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a draft version of a poem entitled "A Carol-Cluster at 69" which was likely composed and edited around the time of its first publication in the New York Herald, May 21, 1888. In the same year, this poem appears in the annex Sands at Seventy under the title "A Carol Closing Sixty-nine".


Case from Second Bull Run, A

Whitman Archive Title: [Hospitals Culpepper]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00485
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Diaries, Diary Notes, and Address Books
Box: 1
Folder: Diaries, 1863–1864, hospital notebooks (2 vols.)
Date: 1863–1864
Genre: prose
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: A Civil War diary in which Whitman recorded notes relating to his experiences in Washington D.C. during 1863. Some of these notes were used in "A Case from Second Bull Run," a short piece about the death of John Mahay, first published in the 11 December 1864 issue of the New-York Times under the title "Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers. Visits Among Army Hospitals, At Washington, on the Field, and here in New-York." Whitman included this paragraph in Memoranda During the War (1876) and Specimen Days & Collect (1882). Other portions of this diary contributed directly to Memoranda During the War and others were first published in "Letter from Washington," New-York Times, 4 October 1863.


Cedar-Apples

Whitman Archive Title: cedar-apples
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00030
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 46
Repository Title: Cedar-apples
Date: 1878
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Draft notes of a short prose item, dated 25 April 1878. This prose piece appeared undated in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) titled, "Cedar-Apples."



Whitman Archive Title: [May 17 '81—Glendale]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00527
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Prose notes, dated May 17, 1881, that may have contributed to "Cedar-Apples," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882-83).


Centennial Edition of Leaves of Grass

Whitman Archive Title: [Drifts & Bubbles]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05073
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Century Thoughts]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05074
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Walt Whitman's Centennial]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05075
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Centennial Ed'n

Whitman Archive Title: [Centennial Ed'n]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00163
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 53
Repository Title: Leaves of Grass & Two Rivulets: Draft of Advertisement for Centennial Edition, 1876
Repository ID: #3829-a.
Date: 1870-1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is a draft for the 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 the expression "Italian card" instead of "Italian boards") to a manuscript preserved in Harned collection (see loc.05636).



Whitman Archive Title: [Centennial Ed'n]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05636
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


Chanting the Square Deific

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of "(the Devil
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00273
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: 1865 or before
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This note for a poem about the devil is possibly related to the poem "Chanting the Square Deific," which was first published in 1865. The scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "And there a hunter's camp," "(written for the voice)," and "Poem of Sadness."



Whitman Archive Title: [Once I passed through a populous]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00183
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The recto verses appearing on this manuscript became the main section 9 of "Enfans d'Adam" in 1860 and were retitled "Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City" in 1867. On the verso appear two fragments: an undeleted verse that would be used in Satan's section of "Chanting the Square Deific" in "Sequel to Drum-Taps" (1865-66); and what would become section 23 of "Proto-Leaf", which becomes "Starting from Paumanok" in 1867. The undeleted verse is upside-down relative to the deleted section.



Whitman Archive Title: [I for the old round earth]
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00022
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Preface to Leaves of Grass
Repository ID: HM 6714
Date: 1863-1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Although the repository labels this manuscript as a draft of the Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass, it appears to have been written in the mid-1860s and was potentially intended as the opening inscription to the 1867 edition of Leaves (Whitman has written "Inscription, to precede Leaves of Grass, when finished" at the top of the first leaf). While the poem in this form was never published, the line describing the Greek god Kronos as "brown-skinned" may have led to a similar description in "Chanting the Square Deific," which first appeared in Sequel to Drum-Taps in 1865.


Chants Democratic and Native American

Whitman Archive Title: never to be forgotten in lectures
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00795
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 12mo 61
Date: 1855-1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A scrap of poetry with lines that contributed both to the poem ultimately titled "Thoughts [Of these years I sing...]" and to "Apostroph," the opening section of "Chants Democratic and Native American." Both poems first appeared in the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass. The reverse (duk.00131) contains prose about America's need for "her own poems."



Whitman Archive Title: The States
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00814
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 195
Date: Between 1855 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a list of suggestions for titles poems or clusters of poems, including "The States," "Prairies," "Prairie Spaces," "Prairie Babes," and "American Chants." Since this manuscript was likely written in the late 1850s, it's possible that this last title is related to the "Chants Democratic and Native American" cluster in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. On the reverse (duk.00031) is an early draft of a portion of the poem that would eventually be titled "In Paths Untrodden".



Whitman Archive Title: They do not seem to me
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00110
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 4
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 13 cm x 11.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is a draft of lines that were published in "Chants Democratic," number 13, in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. That poem was later revised and published as "Laws for Creations"; however, the lines on this manuscript are a draft of the section of the poem that was deleted after the 1860 publication.



Whitman Archive Title: To a Literat
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00114
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 10
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: The first two verses, taken more or less directly from a prose manuscript, "[Of Biography]," have no revisions, but the remaining three verses represent a significant expansion of the themes in the prose notes and are extensively revised. These verses, which precede "[Walt Whitman's law]" in the composition process, correspond, like "[Of Biography]," to section 13 of the 1860 version of the poem "Chants Democratic and Native American" which was revised and permanently retitled "Laws for Creations" in 1872.



Whitman Archive Title: [Walt Whitman's law]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00115
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 20
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This leaf bears the deleted title "To an artist, literat, &c". The first line "Come, I have now to tell you" revises and expands on another manuscript "To a Literat". These lines were eventually revised to form section 13 of the 1860 version of the poem "Chants Democratic" which was revised and permanently retitled "Laws for Creations" in 1872.


Children and maidens

Whitman Archive Title: Children and maidens
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00266
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 7 x 21 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The laid paper was originally the last page of a letter; a few illegible words and part of a signature can be seen dimly through the back of the composite leaf. Whitman wrote his lines on the verso of the page after turning it sideways. These lines have no known relation to any published Whitman poem.


Children of Adam

Whitman Archive Title: Theory of a Cluster of Poems
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00279
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Note suggesting a cluster of poems about "the passion of Woman-Love," along with a few trial lines, all apparently related to the 1860 cluster "Enfans d'Adam" (retitled "Children of Adam" in 1876).


Christmas Greeting, A

Whitman Archive Title: A Christmas Greeting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00007
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: A Christmas Greeting (1889). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 23.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript of "A Christmas Greeting" was apparently intended for the printer, as there are few alterations. In right hand corner is notation in red: "if convenient let me have proof by noon." In left hand corner (in pencil) is the name "Horace Traubel." The poem was first published in 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: [A North Star]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00008
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: A Christmas Greeting (1889). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 18 x 20.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in pencil on a tan piece of paper cut from a larger sheet, 130 words with the title "A North Star [page torn] South." The poem was later revised and titled "A Christmas Greeting" (1889).



Whitman Archive Title: A Christmas Greeting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00010
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: A Christmas Greeting (1889). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 13.5 x 18.5 cm, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A proof of "A Christmas Greeting" with several corrections.



Whitman Archive Title: A Christmas Greeting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00011
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: A Christmas Greeting (1889). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 13.5 x 18.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A proof with three emendations and a notation by Horace Traubel: "See notes 1/29/90."


Citizens took by mutual agreement

Whitman Archive Title: Citizens took by mutual agreement
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05704
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Brooklyniana, n.d.
Date: Between 1853 and 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A scrap of prose discussing the building of sidewalks in Brooklyn. The writing has no known connection to Whitman's published work. The leaf originally was part of a larger notebook (loc.00024) that probably dates to between 1853 and 1855. The cancelled lines on the back of this leaf (loc.05705) were revised and used in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Since the poetic lines have been crossed out and the prose has not, it's likely that the prose was written later, but likely not much later, based on the similarity of the handwriting. Therefore, this manuscript was likely written around 1855.


City Dead-House, The

Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman. 1862.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00026
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 8
Folder: [1862-1863]
Date: 1862-1863
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 102 leaves, handwritten
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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).


City of Orgies

Whitman Archive Title: A City Walk
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00292
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: About 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4.5 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A faint horizontal line beneath part of "A City Walk," along with the words' capitalization and central position on the page, indicate that Whitman may have contemplated using the words as the title of an independent poem. The closest he came to this title was "City of Walks and Joys," the name he originally assigned to "Calamus" 18 in his "Blue Book" revisions of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. This title was changed in the "Blue Book" to "City of orgies, walks and joys" and finally became "City of Orgies" in the 1867 edition. The manuscript also suggests making a list of things seen while "crossing the ferry," an idea later developed and published in "Sun-Down Poem" in the 1856 edition of Leaves. The poem was retitled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in 1860.



Whitman Archive Title: Original. Walks Down This Street;
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00293
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: about 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 7 x 16 cm paster to 4 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Both parts of the title are underlined. A wavy line appears at the foot of that section. The word "Original" at the head of the upper section suggests that Whitman was sketching out a new poem for a revised edition of Leaves of Grass. If it was the 1860 edition, as his style of inscription here appears to indicate, it is possible that this leaf could represent an early stage of the poem that would eventually become "City of Orgies", 1867.



Whitman Archive Title: City of my walks and joys
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00023
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: late 1850s
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8.5 x 10 cm pasted to 20 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On a composite leaf consisting of two pieces of white wove paper. The smaller section is pasted over some lines in the top-left corner of the larger piece, from the top of which other lines were cut off. The verses became section 18 of "Calamus" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass; the poem was permanently titled "City of Orgies" in 1867. On the reverse of the leaf (uva.00583) appears an extensively revised pencil draft of the first poem in "Enfans d'Adam."


City of Ships

Whitman Archive Title: [Ships sail upon the waters]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00276
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: 1856-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15.5 x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Part of the word "Leaves" appears in the lower right corner of the verso. On the verso, in blue pencil, appears a note, reading "Drum Taps—City of Ships" which appears to be in Whitman's hand. This may indeed have been a draft of the poem "City of Ships," which first appeared in 1865 as part of the independent publication Drum-Taps, but the similarities to the lines on another manuscript in the University of Virginia collection and lack of references to the Civil War indicate that it was inscribed prior to the publication of the the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.


City Photographs—No. V

Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman. 1862.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00026
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 8
Folder: [1862-1863]
Date: 1862-1863
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 102 leaves, handwritten
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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).


City Photographs—No. VII

Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman. 1862.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00026
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 8
Folder: [1862-1863]
Date: 1862-1863
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 102 leaves, handwritten
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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).


Civility Too Long Neglected, A

Whitman Archive Title: [?bring this in the text]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00073
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 43
Repository Title: A Civility too long neglected
Date: 1878–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes which contributed to "A Civility too Long Neglected," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), and included in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Clear Midnight, A

Whitman Archive Title: A starry midnight
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00083
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Supplement Hours
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00302
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Supplement Hours. A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft and trial lines probably written around 1880. These lines are directly related to "A Clear Midnight," first published in Leaves of Grass in 1881. The lines that appear in this manuscript also were published posthumously as "Supplement Hours," a poem that formed 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). The first line begins "Sane, easy, homely."



Whitman Archive Title: Notes where wild bees flitting hum
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00111
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Supplement Hours. A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was likely written around 1880 as Whitman was drafting the poem "A Clear Midnight," first published in Leaves of Grass in 1881. The manuscript consists of two drafts of lines unpublished in Whitman's life, but which appeared in other manuscript drafts with lines that were published as "A Clear Midnight." The lines that appear in this manuscript were published posthumously as part of a poem titled "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).



Whitman Archive Title: [Camden Notebook]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05506
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 3
Folder: [circa 1880], Camden (?) notebook
Date: 1879-1881
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 22 leaves, handwritten
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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: [still call myself a Half-Paralytic]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00065
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 18
Repository Title: Gossip of Early Candle Light
Date: 1880
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of the poem, "A Clear Midnight," which appeared slightly revised in the 1881–1882 edition of Leaves of Grass. This manuscript also includes lines that were used in Specimen Days & Collect, see the description for ucb.00011 in this finding aid.



Whitman Archive Title: A Clear Midnight
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00062
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: A Clear Midnight (1881). A.MS. Draft.
Date: about 1880
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19.5 x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of "A Clear Midnight," written on the back of a letter from "A. Williams" dated December 2, 1880. The poem was first published in 1881.



Whitman Archive Title: Supplement Hours
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00303
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Supplement Hours. A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 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). The first line begins "The lesson done."



Whitman Archive Title: Supplement Hours Notes
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00304
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Supplement Hours. A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 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). The subtitle reads "Notes by a half-paralytic."



Whitman Archive Title: Latter-Time Hours of a half-Paralytic
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00305
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Supplement Hours. A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 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).



Whitman Archive Title: [The lesson]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00306
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Supplement Hours. A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 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).



Whitman Archive Title: ?Some Hours of a half Paralytic
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03275
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Supplement Hours. A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 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).



Whitman Archive Title: [Now for the P]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00515
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Sane culminating hours]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00516
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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 of a half Paralytic]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00517
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.00518
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [As wild bees hum]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00522
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [now away from books—]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00524
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [the wild Bee flitting hums]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00525
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [A September Supplement]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00526
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Now Supplement Hours]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00523
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Clover and Hay Perfume

Whitman Archive Title: [Hay and corn]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00067
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 39
Repository Title: Clover and Hay Perfume
Date: 1878–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Various scraps of paper pasted together to form three separate leaves. This manuscript is a draft of "Clover and Hay Perfume," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and included in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Cluster of Sonnet-Poems

Whitman Archive Title: Cluster of Sonnet Poems
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00172
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: Literary, Undated, These Days
Date: undated
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes for a "Cluster of Sonnet Poems" about the "splendor and copiousness of These Days."


Come, said my Soul

Whitman Archive Title: To a Locomotive in Winter
Whitman Archive ID: bpl.00006
Repository: Boston Public Library: The Walt Whitman Collection
Repository Title: Ten pieces of manuscript
Repository ID: Whitman Mss.1
Date: about 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This is a two-page draft of "To a Locomotive in Winter," first published in the 19 February 1876 issue of the New York Daily Tribune. It appears that originally the two leaves were pasted together as one piece, but have since come apart. On the verso of page two is a draft of an unpublished poem entitled "The Soul and the Poet," which may be a draft of the poem "Come, said my Soul," the epigraph for the 1876, 1881–1882, and 1891–1892 editions of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Go, said his Soul to a Poet.
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00013
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1870-1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Annotated draft of the untitled poem that begins "Come, said my Soul," which was first published in "A Christmas Garland of Prose and Verse" in the December 25, 1874 issue of the New York Daily Graphic. Later the poem was used, without title, as the title-page epigraph for Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: To the Soul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00113
Repository: Library of Congress: George S. Hellman Collection
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These lines appear to be very early ideas connected with the poem first published as "Come, said my Soul" in the Christmas number of the New York Daily Graphic, December 1874, then in the New York Tribune, February 19, 1876. This poem, signed by Whitman, became the title-page epigraph of Leaves of Grass, 1876 and 1891-92. The verso is blank.



Whitman Archive Title: [Come, said my Soul]
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00021
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: 'Come said my soul. . .'
Repository ID: HM 6713
Date: about 1875
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A signed draft, heavily revised, of the untitled poem that Whitman used for some printings of Leaves of Grass, beginning in 1876. It was first published as part of "A Christmas Garland in Prose and Verse" in the New York Daily Graphic of December 25, 1874. The date in the poet's note at the top suggests that this manuscript might represent a revision stage later than the poem's initial publication.



Whitman Archive Title: Come, Said My Soul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00183
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Come, said my Soul… Proof with signature.
Date: 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Signed proof page with no annotations. On verso reads "Copyright 1881, By Walt Whitman, All rights reserved"


Come Up from the Fields Father

Whitman Archive Title: Of this broad and majestic
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00549
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two phrases and images from this manuscript appear, slightly altered, in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that would later be titled "Song of Myself." The manuscript was therefore probably written before or early in 1855. In the manuscript Whitman has added the phrase "the timothy and the clover" to a description of plants growing in a field. On page 18 of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass Whitman describes jumping from the crossbeams of a barn into the hay and says he will "seize the clover and timothy." Later in the manuscript he writes of "the buckwheat and its white tops and the bees that hum there all day," and on page 36 of the 1855 Leaves he writes of the "white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and a buzzer there with the rest." A similar line concerning buckwheat and bees appeared in the poem "Come Up From the Fields Father," and a reference to "clover and timothy" appeared in "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun." Both poems were first published in Drum-Taps in 1865. "Clover and timothy" also appears in the poem "The Return of the Heroes," which was first published in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. On the reverse of this manuscript (nyp.00085) are poetic lines, one of which appeared in the poem ultimately titled "I Sing the Body Electric."


Commonplace, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Commonplace
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00076
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Commonplace (1891). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 27 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one side is a draft of "The Commonplace," which was first published in manuscript facsimile in 1891. On the other side is a cancelled early draft of "Osceola," a poem first published in 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: The Commonplace
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04077
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Commonplace (Mar. 1891). Printed Copy.
Date: March, 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf,
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A copy of the March, 1891, issue of Munson's Magazine, which includes, in manuscript facsimile, "The Commonplace."


Companions (viz

Whitman Archive Title: Companions
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00284
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: About 1860
Genre: prose, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Jotted idea for a series of poems about Whitman's various companions. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Poem of Young Men."


Complete Poems & Prose of Walt Whitman, 1855-1888 Authenticated & Personal Book (handled by W.W.) . . . Portraits from Life . . . Autograph

Whitman Archive Title: Complete Poems & Prose of Walt Whitman
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00044
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 19
Folder: Complete Poems and Prose (1888), Manuscript drafts, Title page
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A mock title page for Complete Poems & Prose of Walt Whitman, 1855–1888 Authenticated & Personal Book (handled by W.W.) Portraits from Life...Autograph (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: [ab't like this]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00045
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 19
Folder: Complete Poems and Prose (1888), Manuscript drafts, Title page
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A mock title page for Complete Poems & Prose of Walt Whitman, 1855–1888 Authenticated & Personal Book (handled by W.W.) Portraits from Life...Autograph (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: [let the big]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00046
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 19
Folder: Complete Poems and Prose (1888), Manuscript drafts, Title page
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A mock title page for Complete Poems & Prose of Walt Whitman, 1855–1888 Authenticated & Personal Book (handled by W.W.) Portraits from Life...Autograph (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: [To printer]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00048
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 19
Folder: Complete Poems and Prose (1888), Manuscript drafts, Title page
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A mock title page for Complete Poems & Prose of Walt Whitman, 1855–1888 Authenticated & Personal Book (handled by W.W.) Portraits from Life...Autograph (1888).


Connecticut Case, A

Whitman Archive Title: New York Weekly Graphic, draft
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00928
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 32
Folder: ca. 1863, "A Connecticut Case," New York Weekly Graphic, draft
Date: ca. 1863
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A revised draft of "A Connecticut Case," a piece of Civil War memoranda which was first included in Memoranda During the War (1875–76) and later reprinted in Specimen Days & Collect (1882.


Continuities

Whitman Archive Title: Embers of Ending Day
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00051
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 31
Repository ID: #3829
Date: between 1880 and 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 9.5 cm x 11 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The manuscript appears to be a draft of a title or titles. The lines on the manuscript—"Embers of Ending Day," "Embers of day-fires mouldering"—are echoed in the partial line "the embers left from earlier fires" in the poem "Continuities," which was published in the New York Herald on March 20, 1888 and included in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to later printings of Leaves of Grass. On the verso is a note, dated December 28, 1880, confirming a request for a set of Whitmans's books: "Dear Sir, I shall be glad to supply you with a set (Two Volumes) of my books—There is only one kind of binding—Walt Whitman."



Whitman Archive Title: [No birth-identity]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00159
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 21
Date: around 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25.5 cm x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a draft of the poem first published in the New York Herald, March 20, 1888 with the title "Continuities". A note at the bottom of the page states "Sent to H March 17" indicating the draft was likely completed near the time of publication.



Whitman Archive Title: Certainties, Faith, Counterbalances, Alternation
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00075
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Certainties, Faith, Counterbalances, Alternation. A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1887 or 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in ink on the back of a discarded letter (cancelled by a diagonal strike) from Talcott Williams, this draft appears to be trial lines for the poem later published as "Continuities" in the New York Herald, March 20, 1888.


Contralto Voice, A

Whitman Archive Title: ['80—Sunday]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00085
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 53
Repository Title: A Contralto Voice
Date: 1880
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A heavily revised and partially cancelled draft of "A Contralto Voice," which first appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and was collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Whitman Archive Title: Rule in all addresses
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00163
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, Rule in All Addresses.
Date: Before 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Lines and phrases on both the recto and verso of this manuscript contributed to portions of the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself," and possibly to other sections of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, suggesting a composition date before 1855. However, this manuscript also includes lines that probably contributed to "Sun-Down Poem" (later retitled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry") in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. It is possible that some of these poetic lines contributed to the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. A line in this manuscript is similar to the following line, in the poem later titled "Song of Myself": "I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself" (1855, p. 17). Another line is similar to the lines "And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's-self is" (1855, p. 53) and "And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man" (1855, p. 26). Another manuscript line is similar to the line "Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man" (1855, p. 23). And several manuscript lines are similar to the lines beginning "Not merely of the New World but of Africa Europe or Asia . . . . a wandering savage, / A farmer, mechanic, or artist . . . . a gentleman, sailor, lover or quaker, / A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician or priest" (1855, p. 24). Three other lines are similar to: "Storming enjoying planning loving cautioning, / Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, / I tread day and night such roads" (1855, p. 38). Edward Grier speculates that Whitman's note "Don't forget the bombardment" relates to the "bombardment" of the "old artillerist" in "Song of Myself": "I am an old artillerist, and tell of some fort's bombardment . . . . and am there again" (1855, p. 40). (See Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:165). Several phrases of the prose on the verso were probably later used, in somewhat revised form, in the following lines from "Sun-down Poem" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass: "The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious, / My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Would not people laugh at me?" (1856, p. 216). The poem was later titled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." It is possible that some of the poetic lines on the verso contributed to the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines "I am too great to be a mere President or Major General / I remain with my fellows—with mechanics, and farmers and common people" may relate to the sentence from the preface that reads: "Other states indicate themselves in their deputies....but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors...but always most in the common people" (1855, p. iii). The line "I remain with them all on equal terms" may also be related to the following line in the preface: "The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms" (1855, p. vii). The line "In me are the old and young the fool and the wise thinker" may be related to a similar phrase in the poem eventually titled "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?": "The stupid and the wise thinker" (1855, p. 92). The phrase "mother of many children" appears in both the preface and in the poem later titled "Faces."



Whitman Archive Title: A City Walk
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00292
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: About 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4.5 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A faint horizontal line beneath part of "A City Walk," along with the words' capitalization and central position on the page, indicate that Whitman may have contemplated using the words as the title of an independent poem. The closest he came to this title was "City of Walks and Joys," the name he originally assigned to "Calamus" 18 in his "Blue Book" revisions of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. This title was changed in the "Blue Book" to "City of orgies, walks and joys" and finally became "City of Orgies" in the 1867 edition. The manuscript also suggests making a list of things seen while "crossing the ferry," an idea later developed and published in "Sun-Down Poem" in the 1856 edition of Leaves. The poem was retitled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in 1860.



Whitman Archive Title: The regular old followers
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00024
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [George Walker]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00143
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 37
Folder: 1855-1856, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry trial lines
Date: between 1855-1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 45 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
Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:226–243, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Starting from Paumanok," "A Song for Occupations," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Salut au Monde!," "To One Shortly to Die," and "A Woman Waits for Me."


Crusades

Whitman Archive Title: Crusades
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00066
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Dalliance of the Eagles, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Dalliance of the Eagles
Whitman Archive ID: lcl.00002
Repository: Liverpool Central Library
Repository Title: The Dalliance of the Eagles by Walt Whitman
Repository ID: 811 WAL/5
Date: 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Corrected galley proof of "The Dalliance of the Eagles," first published in Cope's Tobacco Plant in November 1880.



Whitman Archive Title: The dalliance of the eagles
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00092
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 23
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: late 1870s or 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The poem was first published in the November 1880 issue of Cope's Tobacco Plant and became one of the new poems in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass, where it appeared in the cluster "By the Roadside." At some point this leaf was pasted to a cardboard print of a photograph of Whitman stamped "Thomas C. Watkins" on the verso, but almost identical to one attributed by Henry Scholey Saunders, author of 100 Walt Whitman Photographs, to the studio of Frederick Gutekunst in Philadelphia, and reproduced in the 1889 pocket edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: The Dalliance of the Eagles
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00023
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Dalliance of the Eagles (1880). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, 21.5 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: On a surface made by pasting together six scraps of paper (back of a discarded envelope from Geo. S. Woodhull and Son, Law Offices, Camden, postmarked Apr 6; back of a discarded letter, dated New York, March 29, 1880; and other scraps), a late draft of the poem "The Dalliance of the Eagles," about 120 words, showing a few minor variations from the first-published version of 1880.



Whitman Archive Title: [Skirting the river]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00132
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Dalliance of the Eagles (1880). A.MS. drafts.
Date: 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12.5 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These lines were later revised and published as "The Dalliance of the Eagles" in 1880.



Whitman Archive Title: The Dalliance of the Eagles
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00184
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Dalliance of the Eagles (1880). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25.8 x 18.6 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in ink on a proof of "The Dalliance of the Eagles," "Ah, little knows the Laborer," "Hast never come to thee an hour?," and "My Picture-Gallery," are 14 words of notations in Whitman's hand. The proof has been pasted to a heavy piece of paper, on the verso of which is "A Riddle Song," part of "Italian Music in Dakota," and a clipped headline reading "The Society Articles Save Labor. Lighten the Labor for Mother."


Dante see page 186

Whitman Archive Title: Dante
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00512
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 38
Repository Title: Glimpses of Walt Whitman from 1877 to '87
Date: Between 1849 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A prose note about Italian writer Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). According to Edward Grier, this scrap may have been part of a larger manuscript of notes about other Italian writers (see Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 5:1860). The text Whitman quotes comes from the Westminster Review, American Edition, LI, (July 1849): 186 (see Stovall, "Notes on Whitman's Reading," American Literature 26, no. 3, [November 1954]: 361). This manuscript could therefore date from as early as 1849, although it was most likely written in the 1850s. The manuscript is pasted down to a backing sheet, making the verso inaccessible.


Darest Thou Now O Soul

Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


Darwinism (then Furthermore)

Whitman Archive Title: [other than merely literary points]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00117
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 8
Date: 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A heavily revised draft fragment, composed of several scraps of paper pasted together to form two leaves. The notes found on the first leaf were used in "Preface, 1876, to the two-volume Centennial Edition of L. of G. and 'Two Rivulets'" (1876). The prose fragment on the second leaf contributed to "Darwinism—(then Furthermore)," a short prose piece that orginally appeared in Two Rivulets (1876), but that was later incorporated into the "Notes Left Over" section of Collect in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83). Both of these pieces were eventually included in Complete Prose Works (1892). Cancelled Civil War "reminiscences" on the Battle of First Fredericksburgh and the sinking of the U.S.S. Hatteras appear on the verso of the second leaf. Whitman wrote about both of these events in "'Tis But Ten Years Since (Third Paper)," New York Weekly Graphic (14 February 1874).


Days at J. B.'s—Turf Fires—Spring Songs

Whitman Archive Title: earliest spring wildflowers
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03419
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: 66
Date: about 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Newspaper clipping and notes regarding wildflowers that bloom in early spring. This item was likely created in conjunction with Whitman's composition of "Days at J. B.'s—Turf Fires—Spring Songs," which was first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). It was also later printed in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Dead Emperor, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Dead Emperor
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00006
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Printer's copy of the poem "The Dead Emperor," which was first published in the New York Herald on 10 March 1888 and later reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888). The poem mourns the death of Emperor William I of Germany on 9 March 1888, and the Herald of 10 March contained details of his final hours as well as Whitman's poem.



Whitman Archive Title: The Dead Emperor
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00160
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 27
Date: 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 11 cm x 21 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a draft of a poem first published in the New York Herald, March 10, 1888 entitled "The Dead Emperor". A note at top of the page states "sent Herald March 8" indicating that the draft was likely composed around the time of publication. On the verso appears part of a letter with Houghton Mifflin Publishers letterhead.


Dead Tenor, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Dead Tenor
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00185
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Dead Tenor (1884). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1884
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 24 x 15 cm, 10.5 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in pencil on a small page from a notebook, on which is pasted a clipping from a newspaper about the funeral of Signor Brignoli and the reaction of Patti, pinned to an unmarked proof of "The Dead Tenor," thirty words: "I heard the earliest singing of Patti, (in 1860 if I remember right)—heard her many times, Brignoli sang with her at her first appearance in NY in 1859." The poem was first published in 1884.



Whitman Archive Title: The Dead Tenor
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00186
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Dead Tenor (1884). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 15 cm, 20.5 x 15.25 cm, 24.25 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "The Dead Tenor," with notations and corrections in Whitman's hand. The poem was first published in 1884.



Whitman Archive Title: The Dead Tenor
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00497
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Dead Tenor (1884). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 15 cm, 20.5 x 15.25 cm, 24.25 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "The Dead Tenor," with notations and corrections in Whitman's hand. The poem was first published in 1884.



Whitman Archive Title: The Dead Tenor
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00016
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Repository Title: The Dead Tenor
Date: 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Signed draft of "The Dead Tenor," approximately 14 lines, written on several scraps pasted together. A newspaper clipping with the death notice of Pasquale Brignoli is pasted in the bottom lefthand corner. The poem was first published on 8 November 1884 in the Critic and reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex of Leaves of Grass (1891–92). Whitman was inspired to write the poem by the death of Pasquale (or Pasqualino) Brignoli (1824–1884), a tenor who made his New York debut in 1854 and remained a popular favorite for twenty years. According to Horace Traubel, Whitman appears to have known Brignoli. On the verso can be found various writings, including an earlier draft of The Dead Tenor, part of a letter to Whitman from Charles F. Blanch, and an unidentified prose jotting by Whitman.


Death Bouquet, A

Whitman Archive Title: A Death-Bouquet
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00187
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: A Death-Bouquet (1890). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: A five-line draft of a poem, entitled "A Death-Bouquet," which was never published and has an unknown relationship to Whitman's published work. A subtitle reads "Fresh pick'd noon time early January, 1890, By Walt Whitman." These lines bear some relation to Whitman's brief essay of the same name.


Death of a Hero

Whitman Archive Title: [Private Stewart C. Glover]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00249
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: One manuscript leaf, inscribed on both sides, describing a young soldier who died after being wounded during the Battle of the Wilderness during the Civil War. Most of the writing is in an unknown hand, possibly that of "R. H. Foote," whose name appears on the manuscript. The text of this manuscript contributed to "Death of a Hero," which was first published in Memoranda during the War in 1875–76 and later reprinted in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Death of Abraham Lincoln

Whitman Archive Title: Lincoln Dont fail to note
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07042
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Abraham Lincoln
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05588
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Sketch over rapidly
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02823
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [to speak a reverent word]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01761
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 37
Folder: 1879, "Death of Abraham Lincoln," reading book with proofs, printed pages, and drafts
Date: 1879–1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 33 leaves, handwritten, printed
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Content: Manuscript notes and clippings of printed prose gathered by Whitman in a homemade notebook created from a copy of John Dunbar Hylton's, Bride of Gettysburg (1878). Whitman appears to have used this book as a notebook in preparation for his lecture, "Death of Abraham Lincoln." Portions of this speech were originally published as "Abraham Lincoln's Death. Walt Whitman's Account of the Scene at Ford's Theatre," 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," 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: [The subject or text of my]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01762
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 37
Folder: 1886, Apr. 15, "Abraham Lincoln"
Date: 1879–1887
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript notes attached to a scrap of printed prose, both of which relate to Whitman's Lincoln lecture, titled "Death of Abraham Lincoln." Whitman published this address in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) before including it in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: How often since that dark and chilly Saturday
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00339
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 130
Date: 1880–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A late draft of "Death of Abraham Lincoln. Lecture deliver'd in New York, April 14, 1879—in Philadelphia, '80—in Boston, '81," published in Specimen Days (1882). Though Whitman delivered this lecture for the first time in April 1879, based on the letters which comprise the versos of this manuscript, this draft was not composed until some time after March 1880.



Whitman Archive Title: Lecture by Walt Whitman on Abraham Lincoln
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00328
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: 1886
Genre: prose
Physical Description: about 16 leaves, newspaper clipping
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Content: Notes for the lecture on the death of Abraham Lincoln that Whitman delivered in Philadelphia on April 15, 1886. The notes consist of clippings from earlier printings of the lecture with a few handwritten revisions. The lecture was first published as "Death of Lincoln" in the New York Sun on February 12, 1876. A revised version appeared as "A Poet on the Platform" in the New York Daily Tribune on April 15, 1879. In Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and in Complete Prose Works (1892) it was titled "Death of Abraham Lincoln. Lecture deliver'd in New York, April 14, 1879—in Philadelphia, '80—in Boston, '81. " The notes are mounted in a bound volume along with the letter that Whitman sent with them to Thomas Donaldson, a note written by Donaldson, an engraving of Whitman, and a ticket to a performance of the lecture on April 14, 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: Death of Abraham Lincoln
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00152
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 64
Date: 1889-1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript contains a passage that appears almost verbatim in "Walt Whitman's Last Public," included within the Memoranda section of Complete Prose Works published in 1892. In the piece, written in third person, Whitman describes the speech he gave on the 25th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's death at the Art Rooms, in Philadelphia, on April 15, 1890, and the passage appearing in this manuscript is reported to be the literal opening address of the talk. We don't have certainty that this is true, though, as we do not have a written version of the talk. Some phrases in this version also bear resemblance with the printed version of 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 were also originally published as "Abraham Lincoln's Death. Walt Whitman's Account of the Scene at Ford's Theatre", in the New York Sun on 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 on 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 in 1892.


Death of General Grant

Whitman Archive Title: As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00179
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors. Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 16.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
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Content: Written in pencil at the bottom of a proof of "As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors," a thirteen-line poem on President Grant's death, with a printed signature, four words: "Harper's Weekly, May 16." On the verso in another hand is "tr Nov 20 1885." Pasted on the verso is a small piece of paper, 5.25 x 10.75 cm, on which is written: "This fragment of Whitman's, Mr. (John) Burroughs sent me recently, with a lot of old papers & letters. As it has a memorandum in WW's hand, I know you will like to have it. C(lara).B(arrus)." This poem, published first in 1885, was also published as "Death of General Grant."



Whitman Archive Title: As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00180
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors. Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Signed proof of the thirteen-line poem, "As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors," first published in 1885, later published as "Death of General Grant."



Whitman Archive Title: As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00492
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors. Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Annotated proof of the thirteen-line poem, "As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors," first published in 1885, later published as "Death of General Grant." This proof includes a notation suggesting the printed signature be moved to the left and that three words, "in Harper's Weekly," be inserted.



Whitman Archive Title: As one by one withdraw the lofty actors
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00007
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 1
Date: 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Printer's copy, annotated and lightly corrected, of the poem first published under the title "As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors" in Harper's Weekly, 16 May 1885. The poem was reprinted as "Grant" in the Critic, 15 August 1885 and revised as "Death of General Grant" in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00178
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors (1885). Printed Copy—Camden Post, May 15, 1885.
Date: May 15, 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 54.5 x 36 cm, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A page of The Post, Camden, N.J., 15 May 1885. Written in pencil in the margin at the top of front page are five words in Whitman's hand: "As one by one Withdraw." The Library of Congress's description of the item mentions that page three of the newspaper includes a reprint from Harper's Weekly of "As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors"; however, only one page of the newspaper is currently in the folder. "As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors" was later published as "Death of General Grant."



Whitman Archive Title: Death of Gen. Grant
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00089
Repository: Library of Congress: Walt Whitman Collection
Date: ca. 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of the poem "Death of General Grant." The poem was first published in Harper's Weekly Magazine on May 16, 1885 under the title "As One by One Withdraw the Lofty Actors." It was later reprinted as "Grant" in the Critic on August 15, 1885. It finally appeared, in an altered form and under the title "Death of General Grant," in "Sands at Seventy" (first a part of November Boughs [1888] and then as an annex to the 1889 reprinting of Leaves of Grass). Since this manuscript is titled "Death of Gen. Grant" and does not contain the poem's second verse (which Whitman cut from the "Sands at Seventy" version) it is likely that this copy was written in or around 1888, despite the note (in another hand) placing the date at 1885.


Death of Longfellow

Whitman Archive Title: Death of Longfellow
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00060
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository Title: Death of Longfellow: Camden, N.J.: autograph manuscript
Repository ID: MA 1337
Date: 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
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Content: "Death of Longfellow" first appeared in the 8 April 1882 issue of The Critic, a literary magazine founded in 1881 by Jeanette L. Gilder and Joseph B. Gilder. This piece was reprinted in Essays from "The Critic" (1882), alongside pieces by figures such as John Burroughs and Edmund C. Stedman. Whitman included "Death of Longfellow" in Specimen Days (1882–1883) as well as Complete Prose Works (1892).


Death of Thomas Carlyle

Whitman Archive Title: The Dead Carlyle
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00151
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 25
Repository Title: The Dead Carlyle
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript is a draft of the essay "The Dead Carlyle" printed in the Literary World on February 12, 1881 and, with the slightly different title of "The Death of Carlyle" in the Critic, on February 12, 1881. Parts of the essay were used for "Death of Thomas Carlyle" published in Specimen Days in 1882 (later retained in the Complete Prose Works, published in 1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Death of Carlyle
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00210
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 3
Date: 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 7 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Incomplete printer's copy of "The Death of Carlyle," which was published in the February 12, 1881, issue of the Critic. It also appeared, under the title "The Dead Carlyle," in the Boston Literary World on the same date. It was later reprinted as "Death of Thomas Carlyle" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83). The accompanying authentication certificate, signed by Critic editor Jeannette Gilder, mentions that the missing final page of the manuscript bore Whitman's signature.


Death of William Cullen Bryant

Whitman Archive Title: [New York visit]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00480
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 38
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1878
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript is a draft of "A Poet's Recreation" published in the New York Daily Tribune on July 4, 1878. The essay was reprinted with revisions as "Death of William Cullen Bryant" in Specimen Days in 1882. The manuscript is pasted down, making the verso inaccessible.


Death's Valley

Whitman Archive Title: Aye, well I know 'tis ghastly to descend
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00107
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Death's Valley (1889). A.MS. drafts and printed copies.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Eight lines evidently written originally as part of "Death's Valley," which was published first in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1892. The stanza later was slightly revised and published as "On the Same Picture" (the title was probably supplied by Traubel) in 1897.



Whitman Archive Title: Death's Valley
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00189
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Death's Valley (1889). A.MS. drafts and printed copies.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A heavily marked-up draft of "Death's Valley," a poem requested by Harper's Magazine and submitted in 1889, but not published until 1892.



Whitman Archive Title: Death's Valley
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00073
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 28
Repository ID: #3829-w
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 35.5 x 21.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: Whitman's correspondence indicates that the poem was written and sold to Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1889, although it did not appear there until April 1892, after the poet's death. Whitman originally included the poem in his 1891 manuscript for the "Good-Bye My Fancy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1891–92), and Traubel grouped it in the cluster "Old Age Echoes," which he added to Leaves of Grass in 1897. The Harper's printing included an engraving, "The Valley of the Shadow of Death," by American painter George Inness, which appeared facing the poem. On the verso appear the notes "Death's Valley" (twice) and "Magazine/ April, 1892" in, possibly, Whitman executor Horace Traubel's hand.


Democratic Vistas

Whitman Archive Title: for lect on Literature
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05629
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Date: 1850s or 1860s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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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: [Let others say what they]
Whitman Archive ID: med.00783
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: about 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: This one-sentence manuscript, expressing the opinion that "all the military and naval personnel of the States must conform to the sternest principles of Dem[ocracy]," is known only from a transcription published by Richard Maurice Bucke in Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 55. The sentiment and phrasing of the manuscript are similar to statements Whitman made in "Democracy," an essay first published in the December 1867 issue of The Galaxy. When in 1871, Whitman combined this and two other essays to form the pamphlet-length essay Democratic Vistas, he elaborated the point with a note declaring "the whole present system of officering [. . .] a monstrous exotic." It is also possible that the present manuscript represents a draft fragment that contributed the "Preface" to the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), which contains a passing reference to the belief that no "detail of the army or navy [. . .] can long elude the [. . .] instinct of American standards."



Whitman Archive Title: [To What You Said]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00144
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 20
Folder: Democratic Vistas. Manuscript Draft. Original Draft.
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: Cancelled draft written in pencil on the verso of page 30 (Whitman's numbering) of a sixty-five page rough draft of Democratic Vistas (see "[Rough MS of Democratic Vistas]"). "[To What You Said]" bears a strong relationship to the "Calamus" poems that were composed between 1857-1860.



Whitman Archive Title: [Dec 23, 1864 good—& must be used]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00513
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1860–1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 8 leaves, handwritten
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Content: One of a series of draft introductions Whitman prepared for Leaves of Grass, but which were never printed during Whitman's lifetime. Though this introduction was not printed as a complete and distinct piece until collected by Clifton Joseph Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop (1928), portions of this draft were used in Democratic Vistas (1871).



Whitman Archive Title: [The best of the two Introductions]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00514
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1860–1865
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 8 leaves, handwritten
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Content: One of a series of draft introductions Whitman prepared for Leaves of Grass, but which were never printed during Whitman's lifetime. Though this introduction was not printed as a complete and distinct piece until collected by Clifton Joseph Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop (1928), portions of this draft were used in Democratic Vistas (1871). An image of the verso of the final leaf is unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Memoranda of a Year
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00346
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 143
Date: 1863
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 9 leaves, handwritten, printed
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Content: Draft of letter, heavily revised, to publisher James Redpath. Included with the letter, which pitches Whitman's idea for a book about his firsthand experiences among Civil War soldiers, are a title page mock-up, a draft publisher's announcement, the label that Whitman created for these items, and a blank envelope. The letter is written on the reverse of proofs of a circular for the United States Christian Commission, and the label, which dates the letter to October 21, 1863, is written on the clipped front of a United States Christian Commission envelope. Whitman was unable to get such a book published for over a decade. Memoranda During the War (1875–76) includes the short essay "A New Army Organization Fit for America Needed," which echoes specifically the ideas and language about military reform from the draft letter. This essay was later shortened to a single paragraph and republished in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), given the slightly altered title "A New Army Organization Fit for America." The same language from the letter draft might also have contributed to a note on the topic of military reform that Whitman added to Democratic Vistas (1871) when he created that book-length essay from several earlier pieces.



Whitman Archive Title: [Collected in]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06101
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks
Date: 1863-1867
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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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: Memoranda of a Year
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00095
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 57
Date: between 1863 and 1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On one side of these leaves is a fragmentary set of notes concerning Whitman's belief that the system whereby U.S. military officers are chosen should be reformed to reflect the nation's democratic spirit. This is an idea that Whitman introduced, although briefly, as early as the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, though the present manuscript is most likely related to one or more of Whitman's later, more extended expressions on this topic. The most likely possibility is that these notes represent draft material for the 21 October 1863 letter that Whitman sent to James Redpath, pitching a book idea for his newly established publishing house. On the reverse of the second leaf is a title page mock-up for the proposed book, Memoranda of a Year (1863). Unable to get a publisher for his book at that time, Whitman waited for over a decade to publish Memoranda During the War (1875–76), in which appears a short essay on the topic of military reform, "A New Army Organization Fit for America Needed." Subsequently shortened to a single paragraph when republished in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), it was given the slightly altered title "A New Army Organization Fit for America." The present manuscript may also represent draft material that eventuated in a note on the topic that Whitman added to Democratic Vistas (1871) when he created that book-length essay from several earlier pieces.



Whitman Archive Title: For Dem Vistas
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00458
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: 1882 or before
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A brief paragraph suggesting that the unifying motif of a projected volume of miscellaneous prose pieces should be various aspects of nature viewed from the perspective of democracy. Although Whitman eventually titled his collection Specimen Days (1882–83), the present manuscript uses the working title "Mulleins & Bumble Bees," one of many that he considered over the rather long period during which he contemplated publication. In "Cedar-Plums—Names," one of the short essays in the collection, he discusses some of his difficulties with coherence and titling.



Whitman Archive Title: [answer the point]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03681
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: about 1867
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This short note provides phrases that contributed to the essay "Democracy," which was published in the December 1867 issue of The Galaxy. When Whitman combined this and two other essays to form the pamphlet-length essay Democratic Vistas (1871), he ommitted the section containing the phrases in this manuscript.



Whitman Archive Title: 1st Democracy
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05224
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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 Dem Vistas
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00126
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 12mo 58
Date: 1867-1870
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Although this manuscript is titled as a potential introduction or preface to Democratic Vistas or Memoranda during the War it never appeared in that format in either work. However, the thoughts it contains were echoed in an article that appeared in the St. Louis Dispatch on October 17, 1879. The article contained an interview with Whitman, in which he voiced ideas similar to those in the manuscript. A portion of the Dispatch piece would later be reprinted as "An Interviewer's Item" in Specimen Days and Complete Prose Works.



Whitman Archive Title: pref to Dem Vistas
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00791
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 12mo 58
Date: 1867-1870
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A manuscript at the top of which Whitman has written "pref to Dem Vistas." However, the manuscript's connection to any published work is unknown.



Whitman Archive Title: [I do not feel to write]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00228
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Repository Title: I do not feel to write…
Date: about 1867
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This prose fragment, heavily revised, is almost certainly part of the draft material that contributed to the essay eventually titled Democratic Vistas, published as a pamphlet in 1871. This long essay was originally organized as a series of three shorter pieces, The first two of which were published in The Galaxy, under the titles "Democracy" (December 1867) and "Personalism" (May 1868).



Whitman Archive Title: [Draw a picture of a model]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02308
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: Literary, Undated, Model American
Date: about 1868
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The description of "a model American young man" inscribed on this manuscript likely contributed to Whitman's journalism of the late 1850s and represents an early stage of the "model or portrait of Personality, for general use, for the manliness of The States" that Whitman set forth in his essay "Personalism," which appeared in the May 1868 issue of The Galaxy. He later combined the material from this and other essays to form Democratic Vistas, published as a monograph in 1871 and reprinted in Two Rivulets (1876), Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers (1888), and Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Though all the breeds
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06086
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Oversize
Box: OV 11
Folder: 1888, "Elias Hicks"
Date: about 1868
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The manuscript fragment on the recto of this leaf appears to have been drafted for the unpublished essay "Orbic Literature," which Whitman combined with two essays published in The Galaxy ("Democracy" [December 1867] and "Personalism [May 1868]") as Democratic Vistas in 1871. "Democratic Vistas" was reprinted in Two Rivulets (1876), Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers (1888), and Complete Prose Works (1892). The writing on the verso, concerning George Fox and Quakerism, is part of an apparently unrelated two-page manuscript.



Whitman Archive Title: [Is it enough to keep on importing]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00232
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Repository Title: Is it enough to keep on importing the first class production…
Date: between 1868 and 1870
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Prose manuscript fragment, written on a small scrap of paper, apparently from the drafting sessions that produced Democratic Vistas, which was first published at the end of 1870 (though dated 1871). Because the scrap is pasted to a backing sheet, no image of the verso is available.



Whitman Archive Title: [for introductory to]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00251
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: probably between 1868 and 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Fragmentary draft of an introductory essay that was apparently never published. The note at the top suggests that it was intended for some version of Democratic Vistas, which was first published in 1871, or of Memoranda during the War, which was first published in 1875–76. The idea expressed in this manuscript occurs frequently in Whitman's published writings, though never in these particular phrases.



Whitman Archive Title: [Rough MS of Democratic Vistas]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05655
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 20
Folder: Democratic Vistas (1871), Manuscript draft
Date: about 1871
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 65 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
Content: A rough, and heavily revised draft of Democratic Vistas, first published in 1871 and included in Complete Prose Works (1892). On the verso of page 30 is loc.00144, "[To What You Said]," a poetry draft described separately in this finding aid.



Whitman Archive Title: [Among the many]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00004
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Among the many aspects of thought…
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On one side of the leaves, Whitman explores the idea that life, with its petty concerns, is "an exercise, a training & development" for an afterlife. A note at the top possibly indicates that the poet considered developing this thought in conjunction with "From Noon to Starry Night," a cluster that first appeared in the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. Edward F. Grier suggests, alternatively, that the writing is connected with Specimen Days (1882–83), "which is full of references to stars" (Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Edward F. Grier, ed. [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2106). The writing on the reverse sides of the leaves explores the ideal roles of authors and the general public in shaping government and legislation. These notes are possibly related to Democratic Vistas, in which Whitman discusses the role of what he calls here the literary class in connection to democracy, as well as issues of voting and women's rights. The two leaves are housed and described separately at the repository.


Denver Impressions

Whitman Archive Title: Bullion—Hard Cash
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00084
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 52
Repository Title: Denver Impressions
Date: about 1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes on the gold and silver product, which contributed to "Denver Impressions," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). Whitman included "Denver Impressions" in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Dismantled Ship, The

Whitman Archive Title: Occasional Pieces of Poetry
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03449
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: about 1887–1888
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 13, printed and handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
Content: Whitman's copy of John G. C. Brainard's Occasional Pieces of Poetry (1825), many pages of which bear the poet's handwriting. Whitman appears to have used the volume as a notebook of sorts, for while some of the writing seems to be related to Brainard's text most of it does not. Among the handwritten notes are several sets of ideas for poems that were never published and phrases that also appear in Whitman's personal correspondence. Some of these are phrases that Whitman inscribed in the copy of Complete Poems & Prose (1888) that he gave to Horace Traubel. On other pages are words from his letter to Anne Gilchrist of November 11, 1871. These were perhaps copied into the Brainard volume as he worked to write a poem in Gilchrist's honor, though they did not make it into "Going Somewhere," the poetic tribute that Whitman published in the November 1887 issue of Lippincott's Magazine (without individual title, but in a group of four poems collectively labelled "November Boughs"). A draft of "Going Somewhere" appears elsewhere in this volume. Also present is a draft of "The Dismantled Ship," which was first published in the New York Herald on February 23, 1888. Both poems were later included in November Boughs (1888) and in subsequent printings of Leaves of Grass. Only those pages with Whitman's handwritten notes are linked from this record. For a more complete discussion of this item, see Nicole Gray, "Walt Whitman's Marginalia as Occasional Practice," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 107 (December 2013), 467–494.



Whitman Archive Title: The Dismantled Ship
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00191
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Dismantled Ship (1888). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of "The Dismantled Ship," first published in 1888, written on the inside of an opened envelope (postmark date unclear). At the bottom of the page in a note in Whitman's hand: "probably printed in Herald 19th Feb. '88."


Distant Sounds

Whitman Archive Title: The wild carrot
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00098
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 67
Repository Title: The Wild Carrot
Date: 1878–1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript consists of three smaller scraps of paper that have been pasted together to form a larger sheet. The first part of this manuscript was slightly revised and used nearly verbatim in "Mature Summer Days and Nights." The second and third scraps were revised and contributed to "Distant Sounds." Both of these prose pieces first appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), and were included in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Distant Sounds
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00226
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Repository Title: How I Get Around and Take Notes at Sixty
Date: about 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: The fourth and fifth leaves of the printer's copy for "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes. (No. 2.)", which was published in the Critic on April 9, 1881. Though he did not include this essay as a whole in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), Whitman reprinted parts of it under different titles. The first of the sections shown here appeared as "Distant Sounds."


distinctness every syllable the flounderer

Whitman Archive Title: distinctness every syllable the flounderer
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00119
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: distinctness every syllable the flounderer spoke
Date: 1840s or early 1850s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Richard Maurice Bucke, one of Whitman's literary executors, first printed this manuscript in Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., 1899). There, Bucke notes that this manuscript likely dates from the "40's or early '50's" (116). It is possibly a draft of an early piece of fiction, but no connection to Whitman's known published works has been established.


dithyrambic trochee

Whitman Archive Title: dithyrambic trochee
Whitman Archive ID: rut.00022
Repository: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey: Special Collections and University Archives
Date: Between 1846 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript consists of notes about various poetic meters, with Whitman writing the derivation of the term, a description of the meter, and then providing an example of a poetic line employing that meter. The example for hexameter (at the bottom of leaf 1 recto) is taken from a line in Homer. Whitman marked this line in an article published in an 1846 issue of the American Whig Review ("Translators of Homer" American Whig Review 4, no. 1 [July 1846]: 364). Thus, the date of this manuscript is after 1846. The manuscript is held at Rutgers University Library along with several similar manuscripts that probably date from around or before 1855. In his transcription of the manuscript, Edward Grier includes an additional section copied from Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments. See Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:355–356.


do nothing but lose from

Whitman Archive Title: do nothing but lose from
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00457
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A brief cancelled prose note about the spread of slavery. It most likely dates from the 1850s. The piece of paper on which the note was written has been pasted to another leaf, and some of the writing on the verso (yal.00441) is related to the poem eventually titled "Great Are the Myths."


Do you ask me what

Whitman Archive Title: Do you ask me
Whitman Archive ID: med.00730
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Between 1850 and 1870
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: As the physical manuscript has not been located, the composition date is difficult to determine. The manuscript's language and phrasing resembles that of the early editions of Leaves of Grass, so it likely that it was written in the 1850s or 1860s.


Down at the Front [Falmouth]

Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman. 1862.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00026
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Hospital book 12
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04695
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Diaries, Diary Notes, and Address Books
Box: 1
Folder: Diaries, 1863–1864, hospital notebooks, (2 vols.)
Date: 1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 40 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
Content: A homemade notebook containing hospital and Civil War notes that Whitman recorded between February and May 1864. The entry which begins, "I find this in my notes" (see images 35, 36, and 38) was revised and used in "Some War Memoranda. Jotted Down at the Time," which appeared in North American Review (January 1887). This piece was reprinted in November Boughs (1888) before being collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). The entry which begins, "ah if it might prove" (see image 64) was used in Memoranda During the War (1875–1876) and again in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), in a piece describing Whitman's visit to an army camp hospital in Falmouth, Virginia, in December, 1862, titled "Down at the Front." The essay was later included in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Drum-Taps

Whitman Archive Title: Others may praise what they like
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00079
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript, a draft of "Others May Praise What They Like," was likely written shortly before the poem's publication in Drum Taps (1865). Perhaps because this poem did not treat the war, Whitman moved it from Drum-Taps into Passage to India, and ultimately into the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster of Leaves of Grass. On the back of the leaf is a fragment of an undated draft letter to an unspecified correspondent.



Whitman Archive Title: Drum-Taps
Whitman Archive ID: amh.00004
Repository: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Date: between 1865-1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This note indicates the proper location for the Drum-Taps poems in the page sequence of what was apparently a manuscript or some other pre-publication form of Whitman's poems. Whitman first used the title Drum-Taps for a volume of poems published in 1865. The title was also applied to a cluster of poems within later editions of Leaves of Grass.


Dutch Traits of Walt Whitman

Whitman Archive Title: [Walt Whitman said lately to one of his interviewers]
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00036
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Date: 1886
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript written by Whitman and sent to William Sloane Kennedy, most likely in 1886. Kennedy would use the manuscript, along with several others, in an article entitled "Dutch Traits of Walt Whitman" which appeared under Kennedy's name in In Re Walt Whitman in 1893, a volume edited by Horace Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas Harned, Whitman's literary executors. It is likely Kennedy's handwriting that appears in dark pencil on the verso.



Whitman Archive Title: [Going back far enough]
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00064
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Date: 1886
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript written by Whitman and sent to William Sloane Kennedy, most likely in 1886. Kennedy would use the manuscript, along with several others, in an article entitled "Dutch Traits of Walt Whitman" which appeared under Kennedy's name in In Re Walt Whitman in 1893, a volume edited by Horace Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas Harned, Whitman's literary executors. On the verso is a portion of a letter to Whitman from W.E. Mitchell.


Dying Veteran, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Dying Veteran
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00193
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Dying Veteran (1887). A.MS. draft.
Date: June 23, 1887
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A dated, signed draft of "The Dying Veteran," first published in 1887. A note at end reads: "Given to Thomas Mosher by Horace Traubel, 1900." On verso of the page is a note by Whitman to "Mr. Curtz" (type setter) asking for a finished proof by the middle of the afternoon, Wednesday.


Early Summer Reveille, An

Whitman Archive Title: [A Bit of Preface]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00008
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 14
Repository Title: A Bit of a Preface
Date: 1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A prose note, headed "Preface—Paragraph" and dated "?Oct Sept '79," with "A Bit of Preface" scrawled in the upper-left-hand corner of the page. Though Whitman apparently intended these notes for a preface, portions of this manuscript were used in "An Early Summer Reveille," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883).


Earth My Likeness

Whitman Archive Title: [O Earth, my likeness]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00225
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: O Earth, My Likeness (1860). A.MS. draft.
Date: 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20.5 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of the poem first published as "Calamus, No. 36" in 1860 ("Earth, My Likeness" in the final version of Leaves of Grass). A number 8 and a roman number VI are at the top of the page. This manuscript has a vertical line drawn straight through the middle. On the verso is a page of prose in Whitman's hand with "Rel." at the top.



Whitman Archive Title: [Earth]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00312
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14.5 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper (14.5 x 9.5 cm), in brown-black ink, with revisions in lighter ink (including the deletion, undone in 1860, of the phrase "My likeness!" after "Earth!"). Pinholes mostly at top and in center. Whitman penciled in the number 15 in the lower-left corner. Originally poem XI in the sequence "Live Oak, with Moss" (with the Roman numeral ornamentally drawn), this was revised to become section 36 of "Calamus" in 1860. In 1867 Whitman retitled the poem "Earth! My Likeness!"


Edgar Poe's Significance

Whitman Archive Title: Edgar Poe's Significance
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00326
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 4
Repository Title: Edgar Poe's Significance
Date: 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Content: Printer's copy of an essay published in the June 3, 1882, issue of the Critic and later reprinted in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Egotistical "Find", An

Whitman Archive Title: I have found my authority here
Whitman Archive ID: nby.00004
Repository: Newberry Library
Repository Title: Notes and fragments: left by Walt Whitman and now edited by Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, one of his literary executors
Repository ID: Case folio Y 245 .W5918
Date: about 1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A short prose manuscript that appears to be related to portions of Specimen Days, specifically "An Egotistical 'Find'." This piece was first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882), and was included in Complete Prose. A note in another hand identifies this manuscript as part of "the Denver Diary of W. W." This manuscript is mounted in a copy of Notes and Fragments (1899), leaving the verso unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: travelling the Rocky mountains
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00083
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 87
Repository Title: Travelling the Rocky Mountains
Date: about 1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily revised prose notes detailing Whitman's trip over the Rocky Mountains in September 1879. Much of the material in this manuscript was revised and used in "An Egotistical Find," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883); and included, without revisions, in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Eidólons

Whitman Archive Title: Leave-taking Words
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00078
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Song of the Redwood Tree
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00064
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 90
Repository ID: #3829
Date: about 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 20 leaves, 11 x 12.5 cm to 22.5 x 17.5 cm, 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
Content: This manuscript contains a rough draft of the poem "Song of the Redwood-Tree" written, according to a note intialed by Whitman, during October and November 1873 prior to its first publication in the February 1874 issue of Harper's Magazine. In 1876 the poem was published in the group "Centennial Songs" and annexed to Two Rivulets. The poem appears ungrouped again in Leaves of Grass (1881). Several leaves contain deleted and undeleted titles or variant verse references to other published poems: "Eidólons", "Waves in the Vessel's Wake", "(a sonnet)" written "for Century Verses," which appears from a Library of Congress manuscript to have been a working title of the group that became "Centennial Verses" and "A California song".



Whitman Archive Title: Eidólons
Whitman Archive ID: bpl.00007
Repository: Boston Public Library: The Walt Whitman Collection
Repository Title: Ten pieces of manuscript
Repository ID: Whitman Mss.1
Date: 1875 or early 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: This manuscript is a draft of "Eidólons," first published in a prepublication review of Leaves of Grass and Two Rivulets. The poem, along with several others, appeared in the 19 February 1876 issue of the New York Daily Tribune under the head: "Walt Whitman's Poems." "Eidólons" was reprinted in the "Two Rivulets" section of Two Rivulets (1876) and in Leaves of Grass (1881–82 and 1891–92). On the reverse of the fourth leaf (surface 8) is part of a faded letter in a hand that is not Whitman's.


Eighteenth Presidency!, The

Whitman Archive Title: Slavery
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00149
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: Slavery—the Slaveholders—The Constitution
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 20 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
Content: References to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 indicate that parts of this manuscript were likely written in the early 1850s. Edward Grier writes that it "seems to be a composite manuscript assembled, in characteristic Whitman fashion, from fragments large and small, with several discontinuities" which were "combined into one essay or speech about 1856 and revised in minor detail . . . in 1858 or later" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2171–2172). Grier explains the discontinuities in more detail in his headnote to the transcription of this manuscript. In that headnote he also speculates about the significance of the mathematical calculations found on the versos of several of the leaves. Grier notes that Whitman's "emphasis, especially in the early pages, on the Constitution as a contract reflects his reading of at least parts of The Social Contract" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (6:2171). In theme, tone, and some of the wording, this manuscript bears a strong resemblance to "The Eighteenth Presidency!" an unpublished political essay that Whitman wrote in or around 1856. For more on that essay, see David Haven Blake, "'Eighteenth Presidency!, The' (1928)," in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 201–203. The leaves of this manuscript have been numbered, possibly by Whitman himself.



Whitman Archive Title: The th Presidency
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06002
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: Literary, Undated, The Voice of Walt Whitman.
Date: 1855 or 1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript draft of the title and opening lines of "The Eighteenth Presidency!" a political pamphlet about the 1856 Presidential election that remained unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, but was written in late 1855 or 1856. The manuscript is collected in a bound book under the general title Walt Whitman: A Series of Six Pieces, Original Holograph Manuscripts.



Whitman Archive Title: The American people ever
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00035
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 13
Date: 1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A manuscript about the California Vigilance Committee of the early and mid-1850s, these scraps contain lanuage similar to that found in Whitman's complete but unpublished essay "The Eighteenth Presidency!" The manuscript alludes to two of the candidates in the 1856 U.S. Presidential election, James Buchanan and Millard Fillmore, who Whitman refers to as "two old traitors," echoing a description of them as "two galvanized old men" in "The Eighteenth Presidency!".



Whitman Archive Title: recommendation to the young
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00794
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 12mo 15
Date: 1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A prose fragment dealing with political independence that contains phrases and ideas similar to those found in Whitman's complete but unpublished essay "The Eighteenth Presidency!" The essay was subtitled "Voice of Walt Whitman to each Young Man in the Naton, North, South, East, and West," a line which is echoed in this manuscript. The reverse contains notes for poetry, including phrases which appear in section 6 of the final version of"Starting from Paumanok," first published as "Proto-Leaf" in the 1860–1861 Leaves of Grass, and in "Mediums," first published in the 1867 Leaves.


Election Day, November, 1884

Whitman Archive Title: If I should need to name, O Western World!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00203
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: If I Should Need to Name, O Western World (1884). A.MS. draft and printer's instructions.
Date: October 25, 1884
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Draft, lightly corrected, of "If I Should Need to Name, O Western World!" with a brief note containing instructions to the printer. These were probably sent to the Philadelphia Press, where, on October 26, 1884, the poem was first published. Whitman later retitled the poem "Election Day, November, 1884."



Whitman Archive Title: If I Should Need To Name, O Western World
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04095
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: If I Should Need to Name, O Western World (1884). Printed Copy—Camden "Post," Oct. 28, 1884.
Date: October 28, 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Clipped copy of "If I Should Need to Name, O Western World" from the Camden, New Jersey, Post, October 28, 1884, with a note in Whitman's hand. This poem was later published with the title "Election Day, November, 1884."


Elias Hicks, Notes (such as they are)

Whitman Archive Title: The village of Jericho
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06029
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Oversize
Box: OV 11
Folder: 1888, "Elias Hicks"
Date: between 1858 and 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This one-page prose draft regarding the birthplace of Elias Hicks was likely one of the manuscripts from which Whitman fashioned his 1888 essay "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," first published in November Boughs and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). The reference to Elias Hicks's daughter Martha Hicks Aldrich as "still living" suggests that Whitman began writing this manuscript before 1862, the year of Martha's death. The reference, in the revision of this passage, to her death "a year or two ago," "about 1863," would seem to indicate that at least that portion of the manuscript was written around 1865. Whitman planned to write an essay about Elias Hicks for many years. While finishing preparations for the printing of November Boughs, Whitman told Horace Traubel, "Some of these bits were written as many as thirty years ago. Some of them I have written within the past year. They are a miscellaneous lot but they all belong in the same stream." (See Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 2: 42.) The present manuscript is stored together with many other manuscripts on the topics of Elias Hicks and Quakerism. Those that directly contributed to the published essay are described separately. Those whose relationship to the published essay are unclear are not included at this stage of our work.



Whitman Archive Title: an ardent temperament
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06025
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Oversize
Box: OV 11
Folder: 1888, "Elias Hicks"
Date: between 1858 and 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two manuscript leaves pasted to a backing scrap to create a continuous inscribed surface. The notes here about Elias Hicks's early life probably contributed to Whitman's 1888 essay "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," first published in November Boughs and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman planned to write an essay about Elias Hicks for many years. While finishing preparations for the printing of November Boughs, Whitman told Horace Traubel, "Some of these bits were written as many as thirty years ago. Some of them I have written within the past year. They are a miscellaneous lot but they all belong in the same stream." (See Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 2: 42.) The present manuscript is stored together with many other manuscripts on the topics of Elias Hicks and Quakerism. Those that directly contributed to the published essay are described separately. Those whose relationship to the published essay are unclear are not included at this stage of our work.



Whitman Archive Title: Western Nicknames
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07052
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: 1847-1869, words and nicknames
Date: about 1885
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: On one side of the manuscript leaf are notes about demonyms for the people of various places in North America. Whitman made use of this list in his essay "Slang in America," which was first published in the November 1885 issue of The North American Review and later collected in November Boughs (1888) and Complete Prose Works (1892). The other side, which has been cancelled, contains a partial draft of an article written in response to an unidentified author who had apparently found fault with American politics and newspaper literature. It is unknown whether the writing on this side led to publication. No images of this item are currently available.



Whitman Archive Title: The mob, the trial of Warren Hastings
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00141
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 36
Date: 1870-1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript with heavily-edited draft lines from Whitman's essay "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," which first appeared in November Boughs in 1888. The essay was also included in Complete Prose Works in 1892. Hicks (1748-1830) was a Quaker preacher and abolitionist who Whitman greatly admired.



Whitman Archive Title: On the Religion
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: I am describing
Whitman Archive ID: prc.00070
Repository: Private Collection of Kendall Reed
Date: 1870–1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: A rough draft fragment of Whitman's essay on Elias Hicks, first published in November Boughs (1888) as "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks." An image of the verso is currently unavailale.



Whitman Archive Title: [for Elias Hicks]
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00011
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 11
Date: 1883-1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a passage that would appear within the essay"Notes (Such as They Are) Founded on Elias Hicks"in November Boughs in 1888.



Whitman Archive Title: Then my mother hastening
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00012
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 17
Date: 1883-1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a passage that would appear in "Notes (Such as They Are) Founded on Elias Hicks"in November Boughs in 1888, which was a prefatory note for the essay "Elias Hicks."



Whitman Archive Title: Hicks (1748–1830)
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03677
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes on the life dates of various famous figures. Whitman used this information for "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," an essay that was first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). The fragmentary names at the top of the list are those of Thomas Jefferson and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Whitman planned to write an essay about Elias Hicks for many years. While finishing preparations for the printing of November Boughs, Whitman told Horace Traubel, "Some of these bits were written as many as thirty years ago. Some of them I have written within the past year. They are a miscellaneous lot but they all belong in the same stream." (See Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 2: 42.) The present manuscript is stored together with many other manuscripts on the topics of Elias Hicks and Quakerism. Those that directly contributed to the published essay are described separately. Those whose relationship to the published essay are unclear are not included at this stage of our work.



Whitman Archive Title: consent of all the other sects
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06038
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Oversize
Box: OV 11
Folder: 1888, "Elias Hicks"
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: One page of a late draft, probably the printer's copy, of the essay "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," which was first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman planned to write an essay about Elias Hicks for many years. While finishing preparations for the printing of November Boughs, Whitman told Horace Traubel, "Some of these bits were written as many as thirty years ago. Some of them I have written within the past year. They are a miscellaneous lot but they all belong in the same stream." (See Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 2: 42.) The present manuscript is stored together with many other manuscripts on the topics of Elias Hicks and Quakerism. Those that directly contributed to the published essay are described separately. Those whose relationship to the published essay are unclear are not included at this stage of our work.



Whitman Archive Title: The division took place
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06070
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Oversize
Box: OV 11
Folder: 1888, "Elias Hicks"
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The writing on this small scrap, regarding the so-called "Hicksite Separation" within the Religious Society of Friends, forms part of a note, headed "Note.—The Separation," included in the essay "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks." This essay was first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman planned to write an essay about Elias Hicks for many years. While finishing preparations for the printing of November Boughs, Whitman told Horace Traubel, "Some of these bits were written as many as thirty years ago. Some of them I have written within the past year. They are a miscellaneous lot but they all belong in the same stream." (See Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 2: 42.) The present manuscript is stored together with many other manuscripts on the topics of Elias Hicks and Quakerism. Those that directly contributed to the published essay are described separately. Those whose relationship to the published essay are unclear are not included at this stage of our work.



Whitman Archive Title: The Hicksite separation appears
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06058
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Oversize
Box: OV 11
Folder: 1888, "Elias Hicks"
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The information on this small scrap was used for a note, headed "Note.—The Separation," included in the essay "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks." This essay was first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman planned to write an essay about Elias Hicks for many years. While finishing preparations for the printing of November Boughs, Whitman told Horace Traubel, "Some of these bits were written as many as thirty years ago. Some of them I have written within the past year. They are a miscellaneous lot but they all belong in the same stream." (See Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 2: 42.) The present manuscript is stored together with many other manuscripts on the topics of Elias Hicks and Quakerism. Those that directly contributed to the published essay are described separately. Those whose relationship to the published essay are unclear are not included at this stage of our work.



Whitman Archive Title: Instructive, recurring back
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06084
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Oversize
Box: OV 11
Folder: 1888, "Elias Hicks"
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript about the life of George Fox, written in ink with some corrections in pencil, appears to be a draft introduction for the section headed "George Fox (and Shakspere)" in the essay "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks." This essay was first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman abandoned the approach to his topic that is suggested in the first paragraph of the manuscript, but the paragraph indicated by the pointing hand, at the bottom of the manuscript, contains the kernel of a key paragraph in the published version. Whitman planned to write an essay about Elias Hicks for many years. While finishing preparations for the printing of November Boughs, Whitman told Horace Traubel, "Some of these bits were written as many as thirty years ago. Some of them I have written within the past year. They are a miscellaneous lot but they all belong in the same stream." (See Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 2: 42.) The present manuscript is stored together with many other manuscripts on the topics of Elias Hicks and Quakerism. Those that directly contributed to the published essay are described separately. Those whose relationship to the published essay are unclear are not included at this stage of our work.



Whitman Archive Title: 1645–6
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06010
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Oversize
Box: OV 11
Folder: 1888, "Elias Hicks"
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These notes are based on Whitman's reading of the third volume of George L. Craik and Charles Macfarlane's The Pictorial History of England (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1848). He incorporated some of this information into his essay "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," which was first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman planned to write an essay about Elias Hicks for many years. While finishing preparations for the printing of November Boughs, Whitman told Horace Traubel, "Some of these bits were written as many as thirty years ago. Some of them I have written within the past year. They are a miscellaneous lot but they all belong in the same stream." (See Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 2: 42.) The present manuscript is stored together with many other manuscripts on the topics of Elias Hicks and Quakerism. Those that directly contributed to the published essay are described separately. Those whose relationship to the published essay are unclear are not included at this stage of our work.



Whitman Archive Title: opening of George Fox
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06018
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Oversize
Box: OV 11
Folder: 1888, "Elias Hicks"
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A one-page draft fragment, heavily revised, related to the "George Fox (and Shakspere)" section of Whitman's 1888 essay "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," first published in November Boughs and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman planned to write an essay about Elias Hicks for many years. While finishing preparations for the printing of November Boughs, Whitman told Horace Traubel, "Some of these bits were written as many as thirty years ago. Some of them I have written within the past year. They are a miscellaneous lot but they all belong in the same stream." (See Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 2: 42.) The present manuscript is stored together with many other manuscripts on the topics of Elias Hicks and Quakerism. Those that directly contributed to the published essay are described separately. Those whose relationship to the published essay are unclear are not included at this stage of our work.



Whitman Archive Title: [Often too in real size and value]
Whitman Archive ID: rml.00001
Repository: Rosenbach Museum and Library
Repository Title: Often too in real size and value
Repository ID: AMs 1282/30
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A heavily revised and struck through prose draft fragment, portions of which appeared in the last paragraph of "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," November Boughs (1888) before being collected under the same title in Complete Prose (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: The Consciences—the Moral one
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00208
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 3
Repository Title: The Conscience - the moral one,
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript fragment regarding the importance of the spiritual aspect of human consciousness is probably part of a draft of "A Lingering Note" in "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks." The essay was first published in November Boughs (1888). The leaf has been pasted to a backing sheet, rendering the verso inaccessible.



Whitman Archive Title: [for the Notes]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00221
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Repository Title: For the notes…
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This short note refers to a passage in the third edition of Edward FitzGerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia, published in 1872. Whitman quotes stanza 66 of FitzGerald's work in his essay "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," which was first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). He had apparently intended to include, as a footnote to his quotation, the next three stanzas of the Rubáiyát, but these do not appear in the article as it was printed.



Whitman Archive Title: [George Fox]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00038
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 3
Repository Title: November Boughs
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript fragment seems to have functioned partly as reading notes and partly as draft material for the "George Fox (and Shakspere)" section of "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks." The essay was first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [or even scientific values, having]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00276
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 3
Repository Title: …or even scientific values, having done their office…
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript fragment is a partial draft of "George Fox (and Shakspere.)", the final section of "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," an essay first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [even in the old attack]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00213
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 4
Repository Title: Even in the old attack and 6th or 7th recurrence…
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily corrected draft of a phrase that appears at the end of the "Prefatory Note" section of "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," an essay first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1891–1892). The draft is written on what was apparently a book wrapper. The printed text on the inside of the wrapper is from the Seventh Annual Report of the Dante Society, which was dated May 15, 1888.



Whitman Archive Title: [The following are but casual fragments]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00216
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Repository Title: The following are but casual fragments...
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A small scrap on which is written a heavily revised sentence of the "Prefatory Note" in "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," an essay first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1891–1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [—while so many kings, generals, philosophers, poets]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00203
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript fragment, written as a series of phrases interspersed with names and dates, is an early draft toward the introductory paragraph of "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," an essay that was first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [While the great composers Beethoven]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00204
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript fragment is an early draft of material Whitman used in the introductory paragraph of "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," an essay that was first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). See also tex.00204, a closely related manuscript. The leaf has been pasted to a backing sheet, rendering the verso inaccessible.



Whitman Archive Title: [Elias Hicks]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00273
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Brief notes on the reigns of Frederick the Great and King George III, labelled for use in "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," an essay that was first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [Elias Hicks]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00055
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 30
Repository Title: Elias Hicks
Repository ID: #3829
Date: 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: This manuscript contains a biographical note about the religious leader and abolitionist Elias Hicks (1748-1830). Parts of this note would be published in "Notes (Such as They Are) Founded on Elias Hicks" in November Boughs in 1888 and was later retained in the Complete Prose Works, published in 1892.


Emerson's Books (the Shadows of Them)

Whitman Archive Title: Of Emerson's 1st vol
Whitman Archive ID: wwa.00008
Repository: Princeton University Library: Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
Date: 1860–1873
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript comprised of two separate sheets pasted together to make one leaf. Portions of this manuscript were used in "Emerson's Books, (The Shadows of them)," which first appeared in the 22 May 1880 issue of the Boston Literary World. Portions of the essay were reprinted in the New York Tribune on 15 May 1882 under the title, "A Democratic Criticism. By Walt Whitman." The essay finally appeared in Complete Prose (1892) as "Emerson's Books, (The Shadows of them)."



Whitman Archive Title: [Nevertheless it must]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00098
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 3
Repository Title: Nevertheless it must be distinctly admitted…
Date: about 1880
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes about Emerson and democracy, probably toward what would become the 1880 essay "Emerson's Books, (The Shadows of Them.)," which appeared in the May 22, 1880, Boston Literary World. It was reprinted in part in the New York Tribune on May 15, 1882, as "A Democratic Criticism. By Walt Whitman." Finally, it appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83). The notes on the other side, tex.00462, probably contributed to the preface Whitman wrote for the 1876 issue of Leaves of Grass and Two Rivulets as a two-volume set.



Whitman Archive Title: Emerson uses the Deific
Whitman Archive ID: med.00791
Repository: Private Collection of Ed Folsom
Date: about 1872
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains notes that Ed Folsom suggests "seem to be early (1872) notes toward what would eventually become Whitman's 1880 essay" on Emerson. "Emerson's Books (The Shadows of Them.)" first appeared in the Boston Literary World on 22 May 1880. It was later reprinted as "A Democratic Criticism. By Walt Whitman" in the New York Tribune (15 May 1882). Finally, it appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and Complete Prose Works (1892) under the first title. For more on how this manuscript relates to "Emerson's Books," and to read a transcription, see Ed Folsom, "Whitman's Notes on Emerson: An Unpublished Manuscript," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 18.1 (Summer 2000), 20-62.



Whitman Archive Title: Emerson's Books, (the shadows of them)
Whitman Archive ID: bow.00003
Repository: Bowdoin College Library: Abbott Memorial Collection
Repository Title: Whitman's "Emerson's Books, (Shadows of Them)," [n.d.], AMS, 6p.
Date: 1880
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Manuscript prepared for the printer of an essay written for the Literary World (Boston) of May 22, 1880.



Whitman Archive Title: Emerson's Books, (the Shadows of Them.)
Whitman Archive ID: bow.00005
Repository: Bowdoin College Library: Abbott Memorial Collection
Repository Title: Whitman's "Emerson's Books, (Shadows of Them)," [n.d.], galley proof with holograph corrections, [1]p.
Date: 1880
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Partial galley proof, with corrections and marginal note, of an essay first published in the May 22, 1880, issue of the Literary World (Boston). In 1882, a revised version was published under the same title in the "Notes Left Over" section of Specimen Days & Collect.


Ended Day, An

Whitman Archive Title: [He Went Out With the Tide]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01559
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [the intellectual and emotional]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02813
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


Entering a Long Farm-Lane

Whitman Archive Title: Entering a long farm-lane
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01030
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "A Long Farm-Lane," draft
Date: about 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A draft of "Entering a Long Farm-Lane," which first appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882) before being collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Epos of Democracy, The

Whitman Archive Title: [The Epos of Democracy]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00019
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 4
Repository Title: The epos of democracy…
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Heavily revised draft of approximately five lines. Connections between this manuscript and Whitman's published work are uncertain, but the lines bear some resemblance to the poem "Ashes of Soldiers," first published in Drum-Taps in 1865. This manuscript is pasted down and no verso image is available.


Ethiopia Saluting the Colors

Whitman Archive Title: Ethiopia saluting the colors
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00004
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository ID: MA 518.1
Date: between 1867 and 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: A two-page draft of "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors," which was first published in the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman had written the poem several years earlier and submitted it for publication in the Galaxy in 1867, under the title "Ethiopia Commenting." The poem was accepted by the Galaxy but never published. The poem was slightly revised after its 1871 printing before being included in the "Drum-Taps" cluster of the 1881 edition of Leaves. The placement of commas and dashes, as well as the inclusion of numbered sections, suggest that this particular draft was written sometime between 1867 and 1871 (the numbered sections were not included in the 1881 version). The second page of the draft shows two versions of stanza four, one written on the page and another on a separate slip of paper that Whitman pasted over the first as a revision.


Europe the 72d and 73d Years of These States

Whitman Archive Title: Light and air
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00260
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 4
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Language from the manuscript appears in the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The phrase "light and air" also appears in the fourth poem of that edition, eventually titled "The Sleepers." The supplied first line, beginning "Under this rank coverlid," was added to a transcription of the manuscript that appears in Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 16. The line is not currently written on the manuscript.



Whitman Archive Title: Resurgemus
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00289
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Resurgemus (1850). Clipping.
Date: about 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 24.5 x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A clipping from the September, 1884 issue of the London magazine To-Day. Printed in the issue is Whitman's poem "Resurgemus," and in Whitman's hand are some corrections and a bibliographic notation. The publication history of this poem is unusual: it was published first as "Resurgemus" in 1850, then untitled in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, then as "Poem of The Dead Young Men of Europe, the 72nd and 73rd Years of These States" in the 1856 edition, and as "Europe, The 72nd and 73rd Years of These States" in the 1860 and subsequent editions. The appearance of the poem in an 1884 periodical under an old title is highly unusual.


Evening Lull, An

Whitman Archive Title: an evening lull
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00009
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 13
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a manuscript draft of the poem, "An Evening Lull," which was first published in November Boughs in 1888.



Whitman Archive Title: The two songs on this page are
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00014
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 14
Date: June 19, 1888
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains the footnote for poems "Now Precedent Songs, Farewell" and "An Evening Lull," first published in "Sands at Seventy," an annex of November Boughs in 1888. According to Horace Traubel, the footnote was written by Whitman on 19 June 1888 (With Walt Whitman in Camden [Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906] 1:353).


Exposition Building—New City Hall—River Trip

Whitman Archive Title: [visit to Exposition building &c &c]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00075
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 45
Repository Title: Exposition Building—New City Hall—River Trip
Date: 1879–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: A draft of "Exposition Building—New City Hall—River Trip," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Faces

Whitman Archive Title: No doubt the efflux of the soul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00025
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Undated Thoughts, Ideas, and Trial lines (3 V.)
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: This notebook consists almost entirely of prose. However, the ideas and language developed throughout the notebook can be linked to a number of poems that appeared in Leaves of Grass, including "Song of Myself," "Great are the Myths" (ultimately shortened to a few lines and titled "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night"), "Faces," "The Sleepers," and "To Think of Time," versions of which appeared in Leaves of Grass in 1855. One manuscript passage is similar to a passage in the preface to the 1855 edition. Thus, this notebook was almost certainly written before that date. Content from the first several paragraphs of this notebook was also used slightly revised in "Song of the Open Road," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves as "Poem of the Road."



Whitman Archive Title: hands are cut by the
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00905
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 9
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains draft lines that later appeared in a revised form in the sixth poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Faces." On the reverse (duk.00264) are lines which, after revision, appeared in the eleventh poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, later titled "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?"



Whitman Archive Title: clearing the way
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00566
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15.5 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. It is a draft of lines that appear in the sixth poem in that edition, eventually titled "Faces." Lines on the back of this manuscript leaf relate to the poem eventually titled "The Sleepers."



Whitman Archive Title: This mouth is pulled by
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00562
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was creating material for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. It is a draft of lines that appear in the sixth poem in that edition, eventually titled ""Faces." Poetic lines on the back of this leaf (uva.00273) may relate to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: something that presents the sentiment
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00110
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A line in this manuscript appears in a long manuscript poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures." The first several lines of that poem were revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880. The notes written in ink on this manuscript probably relate to the poem that was eventually titled "Salut au Monde!" first published as "Poem of Salutation" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. The earlier lines written in pencil may relate to the sixth poem in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Faces." These connections suggest the manuscript was probably written in the early to mid-1850s. The manuscript is pasted down, so an image of the reverse is not currently available.



Whitman Archive Title: After all is said and
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00797
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 3
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The second paragraph of this prose manuscript contains lines which appeared in a slightly altered form in the first poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The poem was later divided into numbered sections and titled "Song of Myself"; the lines here appeared in section 4. The second paragraph also bears a distant resemblance to a line in the poem eventually titled "Faces" and to a line in the poem eventually titled "Song of the Answerer." The reverse side of this manuscript leaf (duk.00007) contains lines related to other sections of "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Facing West from California's Shores

Whitman Archive Title: [(illeg.) Dick Hunt]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00028
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: 1857 Trial Lines and Descriptions
Date: 1856-1857
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 90 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
Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 246–280, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "To a Common Prostitute," "You Felons on Trial in Courts," "Starting from Paumanok," "Trickle Drops," "I Was Looking for a Long While," "Poem of Joys," "Facing West from California's Shores," "To the States," "A Song of the Rolling Earth," "On the Beach a Night Alone," "Full of Life Now," and "With Antecedents."



Whitman Archive Title: Hindustan
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00184
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The number 80 appears above the deleted 79 above the title, along with a pencil question mark in parentheses. This poem was revised to form main section 10 of "Enfans d'Adam" in 1860, and in 1867 was given two new opening lines and retitled "Facing West from California's Shores."


Fancies at Navesink

Whitman Archive Title: [Nor rivers' bays' and ocean]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04150
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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 voice]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04155
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [What burnt-out lives]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04157
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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 fiat sends ye out]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04153
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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 unhelm'd ships and boats]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04166
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [You whirling stream's wild currents]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04160
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Souls of the dying float out with you]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04164
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [O ebbing tide!]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04175
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Voices of Ebb Tide]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04169
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [The human heart in its breast]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04171
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Echoes of Ebb Tide]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04172
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Ebb Tide Ripples]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04173
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Fancies at Navesink
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00072
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: These five leaves remain from what was originally a six-leaf manuscript (a note at the top of the first leaf reads, in Whitman's hand, "these six pages all one piece") of "Fancies at Navesink," an eight-poem cycle which was first published in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. The poems included are "The Pilot in the Mist," "Had I the Choice," "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning," "Proudly the Flood Comes In," "By That Long Scan of Waves," and "Then Last of All." These leaves are bound with others under the title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: Fancies at Navesink
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00327
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Fancies at Navesink (1885). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 48 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: An oversized proof of "Fancies at Navesink," a group of poems first published in 1885. The poems in this cluster are: "The Pilot in the Mist," "Had I the Choice," "You Tides with Ceaseless Swell," "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning," "Proudly the Flood Comes In," "By That Long Scan of Waves," and "Then Last of All." In this proof, the poems "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning" and "And Yet Not You Alone" are not separated, and "And Yet Not You Alone" appears as the final stanza of the first poem. This proof is grouped with two others at the Library of Congress. The proofs have no editorial corrections, but one (pictured here) is signed by Whitman and another contains a note in another hand reading, "from the papers of Walt Whitman given to Mosher by Traubel 1906."



Whitman Archive Title: Note Book Walt Whitman 1333
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05549
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Fancies at Navesink
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00014
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Fancies at Navesink, the Pilot in the mist
Repository ID: HM 1190
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of "Pilot in the Mist," the first in the eight-poem sequence "Fancies at Navesink," first published in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. On the verso is a letter dated October 3, 1884 to Whitman from Richard Hines requesting information about Martin Farquhar Tupper.



Whitman Archive Title: Fancies at Navesink
Whitman Archive ID: amh.00003
Repository: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Date: May 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1
Content: This is a galley proof of four poems from "Fancies of Navesink," a group of eight poems first published in The Nineteenth Century in August 1885: ""The Pilot in the Mist,"" ""Had I the Choice,"" ""You Tides With Ceaseless Swell,"" and ""Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning."" Signed, dated, and heavily annotated by Whitman.



Whitman Archive Title: Fancies at Navesink
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00039
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: between about 1885 and 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript appears to concern the possible arrangement of the eight-poem cycle "Fancies at Navesink," which was published in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. The titles of three poems not included in "Fancies at Navesink"—"After the Supper and Talk," "You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," and "Ah, Not This Granite Dead and Cold"—are also mentioned. This manuscript is bound with others under the title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [or, Halcyon Days]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00043
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: around 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft for a title page, beginning "or Halycon days," with a note at the head "for title page to supplement of L of G not Nov. Boughs." The verso appears to have been a previous title page draft for "Fancies at Navesink." "Halcyon Days" first appeared in the New York Herald on 29 January 1888, and was reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy Annex" to Leaves of Grass (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: Annex at 69
Whitman Archive ID: usc.00003
Repository: University of South Carolina: Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 9.2 x 21.3 cm, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript contains titles for a contemplated cluster of poems, "Annex at 69" and "Fancies at Navesink & other pieces 1883 to 88." The poem sequence "Fancies at Navesink" first appeared in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. The eight poems from this sequence were then reprinted in a section of November Boughs entitled "Sands at Seventy" in 1888, which then became an annex to Leaves of Grass that same year. The poems reappeared under the heading "Fancies at Navesink," although still part of "Sands at Seventy," in 1891. The manuscript was matted, along with a Frederick Gutekunst photograph of Whitman. Because of the matting, the verso of the manuscript is not accessible.


far. Amongst this latter class

Whitman Archive Title: far. Amongst this
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07421
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: "The Play-Ground" (1846), draft
Date: Between 1844 and 1846
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript appears to be a partial draft of a piece of fiction about a character named Ganguernet. The January 1844 issue of The Knickerbocker magazine featured a story called "Ganguernet: Or, 'A Capital Joke,'" which was "Translated from the French by John Hunter." The story includes a scene with a nearly identical plot to the one described in this portion of Whitman's manuscript, although the wording is, for the most, quite different. It is unclear whether Whitman was simply paraphrasing Hunter's translation, or whether both stories were derived separately from the same source text. On the back of the leaf (loc.00264) is a draft of Whitman's early poem "The Play-Ground," which was published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on June 1, 1846. As the prose draft is crossed out and the poetry draft is not, it is likely that the poetry draft was written later. Thus, the date of composition for the prose manuscript is probably between 1844 and 1846. The title "The Play-Ground" is written vertically along the left side of this leaf, presumably labeling the material on the reverse.


Fast-Anchor'd Eternal O Love

Whitman Archive Title: [Here the frailest leaves of me]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00313
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper (15 x 9.5 cm), in medium-brown ink, with one revision in the same ink. Pinholes mostly at top and in center. The two sets of verses are divided by a short horizontal line. In 1860 the first set, with the addition of a new first line ("Here my last words, and the most baffling,") became section 44 of "Calamus"; the poem was permanently retitled "Here the Frailest Leaves of Me", and the new first line dropped, in 1867. The second set was revised to form section 38 of "Calamus" in 1860; in 1867 it was further revised and retitled "Fast Anchor'd, Eternal, O Love."


Father Taylor (and Oratory)

Whitman Archive Title: Father Taylor (and Oratory)
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00044
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Father Taylor (and Oratory)
Repository ID: HM 6711
Date: 1886-1887
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: Late-stage draft (with printer's instructions) of the essay "Father Taylor (and Oratory)," which first appeared in Century Magazine in February 1887. The piece would later be reprinted in November Boughs. Edward Thompson Taylor was a Boston Methodist minister known for his powerful sermons, serving as the inspiration for Melville's "Father Mapple" in Moby Dick. Whitman went to hear Taylor speak on several occassions during his stay in Boston in 1860.


Fifty-first New-York City Veterans

Whitman Archive Title: New York Times
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00929
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 32
Folder: 1864, Oct. 29, "Fifty-First New York Veterans," New York Times, Manuscript draft
Date: 1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A partial draft of "Fifty-first New-York City Veterans," which appeared in the 29 October 1864 issue of the New-York Times. The verso of this draft includes snippets of prose, some of which Whitman included in various Civil War writings. The "Case of Catholic priest & altar &c at side of dying Irish boy" was included in Memoranda During the War (1876). The notes on female nurses during the war were used in "Female Nurses for Soldiers," first published under the heading, "A Few Words about Female Nurses for Soldiers," in "The Soldiers," New-York Times (6 March 1865). This prose piece was reprinted in both Memoranda During the War (1876) and Specimen Days & Collect (1882).



Whitman Archive Title: [some interesting items of 51st]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00185
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 57
Date: 1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 16 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
Content: A notebook on the 51st New York Veterans in which Whitman recorded notes on George W. Whitman and other soldiers in that regiment, including their involvement in the war and snippets of biographical information. While significant passages from this notebook cannot be found verbatim in Whitman's published work, it is clear that these notes contributed to Whitman's Civil War writings, including "Fifty-first New-York City Veterans," New-York Times, 29 October 1864; "Fifty-first New-York Volunteers," New-York Times, 24 January 1865; and "Return of a Brooklyn Veteran," Brooklyn Daily Union, 16 March 1865.



Whitman Archive Title: [In acc't of 51st]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00211
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 58
Date: 1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A small scrap of paper with Whitman's notes on the 51st New-York Veterans, his account of which was published in the 29 October 1864 issue of the New-York Times as "Fifty-first New-York City Veterans."



Whitman Archive Title: [deserter arrested election day]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00172
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 57
Date: 1864–1865
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes and memoranda of the Civil War, some of which contributed to "Fifty-first New-York City Veterans," published in the 29 October 1864 issue of the New-York Times.


Fifty-first New-York Volunteers, The

Whitman Archive Title: [some interesting items of 51st]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00185
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 57
Date: 1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 16 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
Content: A notebook on the 51st New York Veterans in which Whitman recorded notes on George W. Whitman and other soldiers in that regiment, including their involvement in the war and snippets of biographical information. While significant passages from this notebook cannot be found verbatim in Whitman's published work, it is clear that these notes contributed to Whitman's Civil War writings, including "Fifty-first New-York City Veterans," New-York Times, 29 October 1864; "Fifty-first New-York Volunteers," New-York Times, 24 January 1865; and "Return of a Brooklyn Veteran," Brooklyn Daily Union, 16 March 1865.



Whitman Archive Title: [mention with honor Capt Daniel E Jenkins]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00169
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 57
Date: 1864–1865
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A short piece of Civil War memoranda that contributed to a portion of "The Fifty-first New-York Volunteers," published in the 24 January 1865 issue of the New-York Times.



Whitman Archive Title: [Martin Weaver]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00171
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 57
Date: 1864–1865
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A scrap of Whitman's Civil War memoranda. His notes on Robert B. Potter and Edward Ferrero were used in "The Fifty-first New-York Volunteers," which appeared in the 24 January 1865 issue of the New-York Times.



Whitman Archive Title: [51st N Y V]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00173
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 57
Date: 1864–1865
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A scrap of Civil War memoranda headed "51st N Y V" in which Whitman mentions the death of Captain Daniel E. Jenkins. Whitman wrote about Jenkins in "The Fifty-first New-York Volunteers," which appeared in the 24 January 1864 issue of the New-York Times.



Whitman Archive Title: Brooklyn, Jan 19 & 20, 1865
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00152
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 56
Date: 1865
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman's response to learning of George Whitman's imprisonment at Danville during the Civil War. This manuscript contains much of the same information about George and his status as a prisoner of war that Whitman published in "A Brooklyn Soldier, and A Noble One," which appeared in the 19 January 1865 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Material in this manuscript also contributed to "The Fifty-first New-York Volunteers," published in the New-York Times, 24 January 1865 as well as portions of Memoranda During the War (1875–76).



Whitman Archive Title: [Jan 21, 1865, New York]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00186
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 57
Date: 1865
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes from Whitman's interview with E. F. Shephard regarding officers of the 51st New-York Volunteers. Portions of this manuscript were used in "The Fifty-first New-York Volunteers," New-York Times, 24 January 1865.


Final Confessions—Literary Tests

Whitman Archive Title: [? to conclude 'Footsteps']
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00007
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 12
Repository Title: As I loiter amid a scene
Date: 1876–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A heavily revised prose fragment which features the heading, "? to conclude 'Footsteps.'" "Footsteps" was possibly a working title for Specimen Days & Collect. The final line of the prose fragment—"In serene hours, to the Soul, of a fine day or night, Nature seems to look even on the best Poetry and Art as something foreign, something almost impertinent"—appeared with some revisions in "Final Confessions—Literary Tests," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). On the verso of this manuscript is a portion of a letter from J. S. Smith to Whitman, requesting the poet's autograph.



Whitman Archive Title: [I just spin out my notes]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00014
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 22
Repository Title: I just spin out my notes
Date: 1876–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Three scraps of paper, pasted together to make one leaf. Whitman used lines from this manuscript in separate sections of Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). A large portion of this manuscript was revised and appeared under the heading, "Final Confessions—Literary Tests." The line which reads, "I must take notes (The ruling passion strong in sickness and—But I must not say it yet)," appeared slightly revised in the 29 January 1881 issue of The Critic, under the title "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes. (No. 1.)" before appearing in Specimen Days, as part of the section titled "New Themes Entered Upon."



Whitman Archive Title: [Footsteps]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00009
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 16
Repository Title: Footsteps
Date: 1876–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines and trial titles headed "Footsteps," apparently intended for a preface of some sort. "Footsteps" was possibly a working title for Specimen Days. A single line from this manuscript, "Only the undulations of my Thought beneath under the Night and Stars—or at midday looking out upon the Sea," appeared slightly revised in "Final Confessions—Literary Tests," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). Whitman included Final Confessions—Literary Tests in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [These notes are all diverted from]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00023
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 40
Repository Title: These notes are all diverted
Date: 1879–1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A heavily revised draft fragment of "Final Confessions—Literary Tests," which first appeared in Specimen Days (1882–1883), and was later collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). On the verso of this manuscript is a letter to Whitman from James M. Scovel, dated 7 February 1879.


First Annex: Sands at Seventy

Whitman Archive Title: [Sands Drifted]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04180
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Resumés]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04181
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [? Songs]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04182
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Names]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04184
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Sands on the Shores of my 64th year]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04185
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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 & Drift]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04224
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Shore Drift Sands at Sixty-One]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04225
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Sands & Drift]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04227
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Wing-and-Wing]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04228
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Sands on the Shores of my 60th year]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04229
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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 at 61]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04230
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Drift Sands]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04231
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Sands Drifted on the Shores]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04232
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04237
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [As half caught echoes]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04238
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Drift Sands]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04239
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [With every heaving wave]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00168
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 25
Date: 1880s
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 24 cm x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a draft version of the poem "By That Long Scan of Waves" included in the group of poems "Fancies at Navesink". The group was first published in Nineteenth Century, August, 1885.



Whitman Archive Title: Carols Closing Sixty-Nine
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00056
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 20
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript of suggestions for the title of a collection of poetry which eventually appeared under the heading "Sands at Seventy" in the 1888 volume of poetry and prose entitled November Boughs. The title "Carols Closing Sixty-Nine" appears here as one of the possible names for this collection. The reverse of this document contains the underlined words "Sands at Seventy" and a cancelled note reading "for annex to the preced," which corresponds to ideas expressed on the recto.



Whitman Archive Title: Annex at 69
Whitman Archive ID: usc.00003
Repository: University of South Carolina: Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 9.2 x 21.3 cm, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript contains titles for a contemplated cluster of poems, "Annex at 69" and "Fancies at Navesink & other pieces 1883 to 88." The poem sequence "Fancies at Navesink" first appeared in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. The eight poems from this sequence were then reprinted in a section of November Boughs entitled "Sands at Seventy" in 1888, which then became an annex to Leaves of Grass that same year. The poems reappeared under the heading "Fancies at Navesink," although still part of "Sands at Seventy," in 1891. The manuscript was matted, along with a Frederick Gutekunst photograph of Whitman. Because of the matting, the verso of the manuscript is not accessible.



Whitman Archive Title: Sands at Seventy
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00020
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: late 1880s
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a note, written on the reverse of a postmarked envelope, that offers the title "Sands on the Shores of Seventy &c &c for Annex to the preceding," as an alternative to the title "Sands at Seventy," which was first used for a cluster of poems in November Boughs (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: Supplement-Sands
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00111
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: Title suggestions for works, notes
Date: about 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The words "Supplement-Sands" are written in blue crayon on a scrap of paper, apparently torn from a letter. The verso features the beginning of the letter from an autograph seeker, written in Lisbon, NH, 28 January 1884.


First Dandelion, The

Whitman Archive Title: [Simple and Fresh]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00162
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 35
Date: around 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 26 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a draft of a poem first published in the New York Herald, March 12, 1888 entitled "The First Dandelion". A note on the bottom of the page states "sent to Herald March 11" indicating the draft was likely composed around the time of publication. On the verso appears a letter to Whitman from Witcraft dated 3/8/88.


Five Thousand Poems

Whitman Archive Title: That there should be
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05650
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Roundly considered
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05621
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Note A * While
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07036
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: In view of that progress
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05321
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Five thousand Poems
Whitman Archive ID: brn.00005
Repository: Brown University: Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays
Repository Title: Five thousand poems: essay, 1887, New York
Repository ID: Ms.30.93
Date: 1887
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: This manuscript is a late draft, lightly corrected, of "Five Thousand Poems," an essay first published in The Critic April 16, 1887 and collected in Democratic Vistas and Other Papers (1888) and in November Boughs (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: Distinctive and without relation
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05623
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


Font of Type, A

Whitman Archive Title: A font of type
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00003
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 5
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a manuscript draft of the poem, "A Font of Type," which was first published in November Boughs in 1888.


For an idea

Whitman Archive Title: For an idea
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00070
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


for beginning

Whitman Archive Title: ? for beginning
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05215
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


for droppings

Whitman Archive Title: for droppings
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07512
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: "Priests!" (1855), draft
Date: 1850s
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: At the top of this manuscript, Whitman has written "for droppings." "Leaves-Droppings" was the name given to a section of correspondence and reviews that Whitman included in the back of the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. It seems he also considered giving that title to the cluster of poems in the 1860 edition that was eventually titled "Enfans d'Adam." Given that this manuscript contains a proposal for a poem, it's possible that Whitman envisioned it being included in the "Enfans d'Adam" cluster, suggesting a composition date in the late 1850s. However, as the "Leaves-Droppings" title had been on his mind as early as 1855 or 1856, it's also possible that this scrap was written earlier. On the verso (loc.00013) are early lines that contributed to the second poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves, eventually titled "A Song for Occupations."


For Queen Victoria's Birthday

Whitman Archive Title: For Queen Victoria's Birthday
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00198
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: For Queen Victoria's Birthday (1890). Proof Sheets
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 24 x 15 cm, printed, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Proof of "For Queen Victoria's Birthday," with correction and note in Whitman's hand. This item is grouped with another proof at the Library of Congress, which includes no annotations in Whitman's hand but features a notation by Horace Traubel at the bottom.



Whitman Archive Title: For Queen Victoria's Birthday
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00032
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a typed and corrected proof of "For Queen Victoria's Birthday," first published in the Philadelphia Public Ledger on May 24, 1890. Whitman later included this poem in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891).



Whitman Archive Title: For Queen Victoria's Birth-Day
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00020
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Repository Title: For Queen Victoria's Birth-Day
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Lightly revised printer's copy of "For Queen Victoria's Birthday," which was published in Good-Bye My Fancy in 1891. In the same folder are an uncorrected proof sheet and an envelope, which is inscribed with a note in Whitman's hand, indicating that he presented them together as a gift to an unknown recipient. No images of the proof sheet are available.


For remember that

Whitman Archive Title: For remember that behind all
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05334
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


For Us Two, Reader Dear

Whitman Archive Title: An Old Man's Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00230
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 36.5 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proofs of four poems pasted together and collected under the main handwritten title "An Old Man's Recitatives." The poems included are: "Ancient songs reciting" (published as "Old Chants" in 1891), "Grand is the seen" (first published in 1891), "Death dogs my steps" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), and "For us two, reader dear," first published in 1891. A note in Whitman's hand in the right margin details failed attempts to publish this grouping in Scribner's.



Whitman Archive Title: My Task
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00219
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: My Task (1891). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 x 22 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscripts of the following four poems, written neatly with slight corrections: "My task," "L of G's Purport," "Death dogs my steps," and "For us two, reader dear." All of the verses except "For us two, reader dear" were fused together and published as one poem entitled "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891.



Whitman Archive Title: Old-Age Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00232
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 28 x 21 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Proof pages of six poems collected under the general title "Old-Age Recitatives." The poems included are: "Old Chants" (1891), "On, On the Same,Ye Jocund Twain!" (1891), "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!" (1891), "L. of G.'s Purport" (only two lines of the twelve-line poem of the same title first published in 1891), "My task" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), and "For us two, reader dear" (1891). At the top of the first page is a note to the printer in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: Old-Age Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00231
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1890-1891
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 30.5 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A galley proof of a group of six poems titled "Old-Age Recitatives." The poems included are: "Sail out for good, Eidolon yacht!" (first published in 1891), "My task" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), "L. of G.'s Purport" (only the first two lines of the poem of the same title published in 1891), "Death dogs my steps" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), "For us two, reader dear" (first published in 1891), and "Grand is the seen" (first published in 1891). On the verso is a note to the printer.



Whitman Archive Title: For us two, reader dear
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00362
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


France the 18th Year of These States

Whitman Archive Title: France, the 18th Year of These States
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00221
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 5 leaves, 21 x 13 cm to 22.5 x 13.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: Originally numbered 86 and revised by overwriting to 87; Whitman also numbered the leaves 1-5 (in pencil, lower left corner), with the 1 replacing a 6 and the 2 written over what looks like a 7. The leaves correspond to various verses in the 1860 published version "France, The 18th Year of These States". Although Whitman never changed the title, and did not revise the poem much, he did transfer it twice, grouping it in the cluster "Songs of Insurrection" within the main body of Leaves of Grass in 1871 and 1876, and in 1881 finally transferring it to the new cluster "Birds of Passage" within Leaves of Grass.


Free cider

Whitman Archive Title: Free cider
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00156
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Brooklyniana, Undated, Free cider and Long Island character.
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains prose notes about Long Island, potentially related to a piece of journalism that Whitman was considering writing, although the notes contain no known connections to any of his published work. Written at the bottom of the notes are two lines of poetry. The manuscript is written in pencil on both sides of a narrow strip of lined paper, cut from a larger sheet. This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1860.


From Far Dakota's Cañons (June 25, 1876)

Whitman Archive Title: [There in the far northwest]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00121
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: From Far Dakota's Canons (1876). A.MS.S. drafts.
Date: 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 10 leaves, 20 x 12 cm, 11.5 x 18.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20
Content: Apparently, two versions of a poem about the death of Custer. On the verso of the second page is "A Death Sonnet" (see image 14) and on another is "A Death Sonnet for Custer" (see image 4). The poem was published on June 10, 1876 as "A Death Sonnet for Custer."



Whitman Archive Title: A Death-Sonnet for Custer
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00007
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: about 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Printer's copy of the poem "A Death-Sonnet for Custer" with instructions to preserve the manuscript in its current form for Bayard Taylor. "A Death-Sonnet for Custer" first appeared in the New York Daily Tribune on 10 July 1876. It was then reprinted as "From Far Dakotas Cañons" in Leaves of Grass (1881–82).


From My Last Years

Whitman Archive Title: From My Last Years
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00199
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: From My Last Years (1876). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 23.75 x 13.75 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of "From My Last Years" written in ink on a sheet of stationery, with three lines crossed out with a blue pencil and one of the corrections in blue pencil. "From My Last Years" was published only once, in Two Rivulets, 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: From My Last Years
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04092
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: From My Last Years (1876). Printed Copies
Date: about 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 5 x 13.25 cm, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Written in pencil on a scrap of paper cut from the bottom of a larger sheet to which has been attached a clipping of the poem, "From My Last Years," with corrections in the margin. The poem was published only in Two Rivulets, 1876, without these corrections.


From Noon to Starry Night

Whitman Archive Title: [Among the many]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00004
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Among the many aspects of thought…
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On one side of the leaves, Whitman explores the idea that life, with its petty concerns, is "an exercise, a training & development" for an afterlife. A note at the top possibly indicates that the poet considered developing this thought in conjunction with "From Noon to Starry Night," a cluster that first appeared in the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. Edward F. Grier suggests, alternatively, that the writing is connected with Specimen Days (1882–83), "which is full of references to stars" (Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Edward F. Grier, ed. [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2106). The writing on the reverse sides of the leaves explores the ideal roles of authors and the general public in shaping government and legislation. These notes are possibly related to Democratic Vistas, in which Whitman discusses the role of what he calls here the literary class in connection to democracy, as well as issues of voting and women's rights. The two leaves are housed and described separately at the repository.



Whitman Archive Title: [Ever the Dawn!]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04282
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


From Washington

Whitman Archive Title: Henry D. Howell
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00153
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 67
Repository Title: Henry D. Howell
Date: 1863
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains notes on the story of a young soldier, Benjamin G. Howell, who died in the Civil War, and particularly about his parents learning about his death. Whitman would write about this same soldier in the article "From Washington" published in the Brooklyn Daily Union on September 22, 1863.


Full of Life now

Whitman Archive Title: [(illeg.) Dick Hunt]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00028
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: 1857 Trial Lines and Descriptions
Date: 1856-1857
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 90 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
Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 246–280, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "To a Common Prostitute," "You Felons on Trial in Courts," "Starting from Paumanok," "Trickle Drops," "I Was Looking for a Long While," "Poem of Joys," "Facing West from California's Shores," "To the States," "A Song of the Rolling Earth," "On the Beach a Night Alone," "Full of Life Now," and "With Antecedents."



Whitman Archive Title: To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00335
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 10 x 13 cm pasted to 11.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one composite leaf of pink paper formed of two sections (10 x 13 and 11.5 x 13 cm) of the same page cut apart and pasted together in a new order. The poem number was originally 101 and then changed to 102; this number was deleted and the current ?101 added in fine pen. Bowers explains that the poem, in two discrete verse sections and inscribed in black ink (with title), originally occupied one full side of this leaf. When Whitman wanted to expand the first section without having to retranscribe the second one, he simply cut the two sections apart, flipped the first section over (turning it upside-down in the process), pasted the second section to the lower edge of the verso of the first section, and wrote his new first section (beginning "Throwing far, throwing over the head/ of death" and incorporating the original title as verse 3) in the blank space now created above the second section. The new first section is written and revised in light ink. As Bradley and Blodgett observe, the words "thirty-eight years old the/ eighty-first year of The States" indicate that Whitman composed the poem in 1857; these were revised to read "I, forty years old the Eighty-third Year of The States" in the 1860 Leaves, in which this poem constituted section 45 of "Calamus." In 1867 Whitman retitled the poem "Full of Life, Now."


Full-Starr'd Nights

Whitman Archive Title: [Aug 26—Bright is the day]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00047
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 62
Repository Title: Bright is the day
Date: 1877
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Notes dated August 26, 1877, describing the "full-starr'd" night sky of late summer. Whitman included revised lines from this manuscript in "Full-Starr'd Nights," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). "Full-Starr'd Nights" was eventually collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [astronomy]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00194
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Astronomy…
Date: 1881 or 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Two brief notes written on what appears to be a scrap from a small notebook. The note at the top of the scrap furnished an image that Whitman used in "Full-Starr'd Nights," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). The other note refers to an article titled "A Study of Carlyle," published in the April 1881 issue (vol. 39, pp. 494–609) of Contemporary Review and signed "The Author of 'The Moral Influence of George Eliot.'" The article thus referred to had appeared in the February 1881 issue (vol. 39, pp. 173–185), with the signature "One who Knew Her."


George Fox (and Shakspere)

Whitman Archive Title: waited their due time to
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00321
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript is a partial draft of the sixth poem in that edition, eventually titled "Faces." Draft poetic lines are written on the back of the leaf (tex.00079). Both manuscript drafts were probably originally continuous with manuscript drafts on another leaf, from which this leaf was cut.


George Fox and Shakspere

Whitman Archive Title: Voltaire's readable
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05315
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [as real as]
Whitman Archive ID: fol.00007
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library
Repository Title: Autograph notes by Walt Whitman [manuscript], 19th century.
Repository ID: Y.d.1036 (3)
Date: 1878-1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript for a portion of Whitman's essay "George Fox and Shakspere," which first appeared as the final piece in "November Boughs" (1888) and was later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). In the essay, Whitman compares Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement, and Shakespeare, noting that both were "born and bred of similar stock, in much the same surroundings and station of life from the same England—and at a similar period."


Germs

Whitman Archive Title: As of Origins
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00208
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, three pasted sections of 6.5 x 13 cm, 8 x 13 cm, and 12.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This poem became section 19 of the cluster "Leaves of Grass" in the 1860 edition. In 1867 Whitman moved it to a different "Leaves of Grass" group in the "Songs Before Parting" annex. In 1872 it was retitled "Germs" and was ultimately transferred, in 1881, to the cluster "By the Roadside."


Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun

Whitman Archive Title: Of this broad and majestic
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00549
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two phrases and images from this manuscript appear, slightly altered, in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that would later be titled "Song of Myself." The manuscript was therefore probably written before or early in 1855. In the manuscript Whitman has added the phrase "the timothy and the clover" to a description of plants growing in a field. On page 18 of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass Whitman describes jumping from the crossbeams of a barn into the hay and says he will "seize the clover and timothy." Later in the manuscript he writes of "the buckwheat and its white tops and the bees that hum there all day," and on page 36 of the 1855 Leaves he writes of the "white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and a buzzer there with the rest." A similar line concerning buckwheat and bees appeared in the poem "Come Up From the Fields Father," and a reference to "clover and timothy" appeared in "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun." Both poems were first published in Drum-Taps in 1865. "Clover and timothy" also appears in the poem "The Return of the Heroes," which was first published in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. On the reverse of this manuscript (nyp.00085) are poetic lines, one of which appeared in the poem ultimately titled "I Sing the Body Electric."



Whitman Archive Title: Poem of the Sunlight
Whitman Archive ID: med.00779
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: unknown
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Brief note of just eight words, outlining the possibility of a "Poem of the Sunlight." A transcription of this manuscript, the current location of which is unknown, was published by Richard Maurice Bucke in Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 174. Edward F. Grier, editor of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 4:1383, suggests that this manuscript might be related to the poem "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun," which was first published in the 1865 volume Drum-Taps.


[Glendale birthdays]

Whitman Archive Title: [Glendale birthdays]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04691
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Diaries, Diary Notes, and Address Books
Box: 1
Folder: Address Books, 1876-86 (3 v.)
Date: 1876-1886
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: about 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 | 45 | 46
Content: An address book filled with names and addresses, figures, lists, and notes describing various spring blossoms (see image 44). The relationship of this notebook to Whitman's published work is unknown.


Go into the

Whitman Archive Title: Go into the subject
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05620
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 1
Folder: Undated, on the American Idiom
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.


Going Somewhere

Whitman Archive Title: Occasional Pieces of Poetry
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03449
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: about 1887–1888
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 13, printed and handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
Content: Whitman's copy of John G. C. Brainard's Occasional Pieces of Poetry (1825), many pages of which bear the poet's handwriting. Whitman appears to have used the volume as a notebook of sorts, for while some of the writing seems to be related to Brainard's text most of it does not. Among the handwritten notes are several sets of ideas for poems that were never published and phrases that also appear in Whitman's personal correspondence. Some of these are phrases that Whitman inscribed in the copy of Complete Poems & Prose (1888) that he gave to Horace Traubel. On other pages are words from his letter to Anne Gilchrist of November 11, 1871. These were perhaps copied into the Brainard volume as he worked to write a poem in Gilchrist's honor, though they did not make it into "Going Somewhere," the poetic tribute that Whitman published in the November 1887 issue of Lippincott's Magazine (without individual title, but in a group of four poems collectively labelled "November Boughs"). A draft of "Going Somewhere" appears elsewhere in this volume. Also present is a draft of "The Dismantled Ship," which was first published in the New York Herald on February 23, 1888. Both poems were later included in November Boughs (1888) and in subsequent printings of Leaves of Grass. Only those pages with Whitman's handwritten notes are linked from this record. For a more complete discussion of this item, see Nicole Gray, "Walt Whitman's Marginalia as Occasional Practice," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 107 (December 2013), 467–494.



Whitman Archive Title: 'Going Somewhere.'
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00003
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 53
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a manuscript of the poem, "'Going Somewhere,'" which was one of four poems published under the collective title "November Boughs," in Lippincott's Magazine in November 1887. "'Going Somewhere'" was later reprinted in the "Sands of Seventy" annex to the 1888 printing of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Going Somewhere
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00201
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Going Somewhere (1887). Proof Sheets
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 16 cm, 15.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "'Going Somewhere,'" first published in 1887. This proof has corrections and a note in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00326
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of a collection of four poems ("You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone") under the general title "November Boughs." This proof is made by pasting together proofs of each poem in the order desired.



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02484
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proofs of a collection of four poems ("You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone") under the general title "November Boughs."



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04206
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Printed Copy.
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Clipping from a newspaper of four Whitman poems: "You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone." At the top is the title "November Boughs." At the bottom of the clipping is written, in Whitman's hand, "1887." The poems were published first in Lippincott's Magazine, November, 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: Going Somewhere
Whitman Archive ID: pri.00003
Repository: Princeton University Library: Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
Box: 22
Folder: 9
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Signed draft, with several corrections and instructions to the printer, of "'Going Somewhere'," which was published in Lippincott's Magazine in November 1887. It was reprinted in November Boughs (1888) and in the "Sands at Seventy" annex of Leaves of Grass (1891–92).


good hostess that could, The

Whitman Archive Title: The good hostess
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00042
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1840s or 1850s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A brief scrap of prose describing a "good hostess" who makes "fine apple dumplings." The manuscript has no known connection to any of Whitman's published works. Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1840s or 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:297).


Good-Bye my Fancy [cluster in Complete Prose Works]

Whitman Archive Title: But only pond-babble
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05256
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: In general civilization
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00008
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository ID: MA 517
Date: about 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Eighteen lines of prose in Whitman's hand, beginning "In general civilization" and concerning the formation of a "National Literature," written in pencil with corrections in purple crayon. This is a draft of the essay Whitman later published as "American National Literature" in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891). It is laid in one of Whitman's diaries of the war. The draft is composed on the inside of an envelope addressed to "Walt Whitman, Esq., Camden, N.J., Oct. 9(?), 1890" from the North American Review.


Good-Bye My Fancy [separate volume]

Whitman Archive Title: Good-Bye My Fancy
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05454
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: OV 2
Folder: Good-Bye My Fancy (1891), Manuscript draft
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 78 leaves, handwritten, typed
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Content: This manuscripts contains 78 pages of text numbered by Whitman, and is housed along with other materials related to Good-Bye My Fancy. To assemble the manuscript for the printer Whitman used proof sheets, newspaper clippings, etc., between manuscript pages, which were written mostly on paper fragments. "A Death Bouquet" was written on a typewriter and inserted as part of the manuscript. Throughout, innumerable changes, corrections, and directions for the printer appear. The poems included are: "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!," "Lingering Last Drops," "Good-bye My Fancy," "On, on the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!," "My 71st Year," "Apparitions," "The Pallid Wreath," "An Ended Day," "Old Age's Ship & Crafty Death's," "To the Pending Year" (earlier title "To the Year 1889" crossed out), "Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher," "Long, Long Hence" (earlier title "Under These Poemets" crossed out), "Bravo, Paris Exposition!" (earlier title "Bravo, Paris Exhibition!" crossed out), "Interpolation Sounds," "To the Sun-Set Breeze," "Old Chants," "A Christmas Greeting," "Sounds of the Winter," "A Twilight Song," "When the Full-grown Poet Came," "Osceola," "A Voice from Death," "A Persian Lesson," "The Commonplace," "'The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete,'" "Mirages," "L. of G.'s Purport" (which includes three poems originally composed separately, "My task," "Death dogs my steps," and "For us two, reader dear"), "The Unexpress'd," "Grand is the Seen," "Unseen Buds," "Good-bye My Fancy!," "For Queen Victoria's Birthday," "Death's Valley," "After an Interval," "As in a Swoon," "L. of G.," and "After the Argument." Also included are several prose pieces. Also in this folder are a wrapper addressed to "Ferguson Bros. & Co; Printers, Phila.," two statements by Ferguson Bros. to Whitman, a statement dated May 18, 1891, by Grosscup and West, Phila. for the plates of Whitman's portrait to be included in the book (they had been ordered by Traubel), two trial title pages, and a proof portrait from the engraver.



Whitman Archive Title: Good-Bye My Fancy
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05452
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: OV 2
Folder: Good-Bye My Fancy (1891), Manuscript draft
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 10 leaves, handwritten, printed
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
Content: Manuscript and corrected print material that was included in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891).



Whitman Archive Title: But only pond-babble
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05256
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Good-Bye My Fancy
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05458
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Date: 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, printed, 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: Manuscript and corrected print material that was included in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891). Some leaves are composed of various scraps of paper, including envelopes and pieces of correspondence that have been pasted together to make larger leaves (see images 15 through 20).


Gossip at Dusk

Whitman Archive Title: Gossip at Dusk
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00367
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Grand is the Seen

Whitman Archive Title: Grand is the Seen
Whitman Archive ID: har.00001
Repository: Harvard University: Manuscripts Department, Houghton Library
Repository ID: bMS Am 1343 (546)
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is an unsigned draft of "Grand Is the Seen," a poem first published in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891). Good-Bye My Fancy was then included as the second annex to the Deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (1891-92).



Whitman Archive Title: An Old Man's Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00230
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 36.5 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proofs of four poems pasted together and collected under the main handwritten title "An Old Man's Recitatives." The poems included are: "Ancient songs reciting" (published as "Old Chants" in 1891), "Grand is the seen" (first published in 1891), "Death dogs my steps" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), and "For us two, reader dear," first published in 1891. A note in Whitman's hand in the right margin details failed attempts to publish this grouping in Scribner's.



Whitman Archive Title: Grand is the seen
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00363
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Old-Age Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00231
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1890-1891
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 30.5 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A galley proof of a group of six poems titled "Old-Age Recitatives." The poems included are: "Sail out for good, Eidolon yacht!" (first published in 1891), "My task" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), "L. of G.'s Purport" (only the first two lines of the poem of the same title published in 1891), "Death dogs my steps" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), "For us two, reader dear" (first published in 1891), and "Grand is the seen" (first published in 1891). On the verso is a note to the printer.


Great Army of the Sick, The

Whitman Archive Title: [I go around]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00097
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 45
Repository Title: I go around among these sights...
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1860-1863
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript is possibly an early draft of another manuscript held at the University of Texas-Austin, entitled "The Army Hospitals." That manuscript was used in the first paragraph of the article "The Great Army of the Sick," which was published in the New York Times on February 26, 1863. The contents of both these manuscripts contributed to "Feb. 23," published in Memoranda During the War (1875-1876) and "Patent-Office Hospital" published in Specimen Days in 1882 (later retained in the Complete Prose Works, published in 1892).


Had I the Choice

Whitman Archive Title: Had I the Choice
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00073
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is an early draft of the poem "Had I the Choice," published as part of "Fancies at Navesink" in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. This manuscript is bound with others under the title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: Had I the Choice
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00040
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a draft of the poem "Had I the Choice," published as part of "Fancies at Navesink" in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. The leaf is bound with others under the title "Fancies at Navesink."


Halcyon Days

Whitman Archive Title: [or, Halcyon Days]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00043
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: around 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft for a title page, beginning "or Halycon days," with a note at the head "for title page to supplement of L of G not Nov. Boughs." The verso appears to have been a previous title page draft for "Fancies at Navesink." "Halcyon Days" first appeared in the New York Herald on 29 January 1888, and was reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy Annex" to Leaves of Grass (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: Halcyon Days
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00072
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: bv2
Folder:
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf,
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily revised draft, approximately eleven lines, of "Halcyon Days," which was first published in the 29 January 1888 issue of the New York Herald. One the reverse is a letter from Fred W. Waggert, dated "4th June 1887."


Hand-Mirror, A

Whitman Archive Title: A hand-mirror
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00225
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Originally titled "Looking-Glass" and numbered 82 and revised by overwriting to 83. The poem remained unchanged and with the same title since its first appearance in the 1860 edition. This poem was titled but ungrouped until 1881, when Whitman finally placed it in the cluster "By the Roadside."


Hannah Brush

Whitman Archive Title: Hannah Brush
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00698
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: Isaac Joseph Stephen Jesse (my grandfather)...
Date: Between 1850 and 1880
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Edward Grier tentatively dates the handwriting of this manuscript to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:16). The notes are similar to many of Whitman's other jottings about family in the 1850s and 1860s. At the repository this manuscript is bound with three other manuscript leaves and two newspaper clippings, also about members of Whitman's family. It is not clear whether Whitman or a collector bound the items, which are on different sizes and types of paper and appear to have been written at different times.


Happy Day's Command, A

Whitman Archive Title: [nights by a peaceful happy creek]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00018
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 30
Repository Title: Nights by a peaceful happy creek
Date: 1880–1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A heavily revised draft of "A Happy Hour's Command," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), which later appeared in Complete Prose Works (1892). The verso of this manuscript contains two cancelled lines: "In highest Noon I sing & Starry Night" and "with other Pieces & Specimen Days." Though "From Noon to Starry Night" is an 1881 cluster in Leaves of Grass, there is no other connection between this manuscript and Whitman's published work.



Whitman Archive Title: [good prefatory passage]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00020
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 36
Repository Title: Specimen days, here and there
Date: 1880–1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes intended for a prefatory passage that bear a loose resemblance to ideas and themes presented in "A Happy Hour's Command," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), which later appeared in Complete Prose Works (1892). A comment at the top of the page indicates that Whitman considered using these lines in a footnote at the beginning of Specimen Days. Whitman made a similar notation on "I have jotted down these memoranda" (described above), portions of which were used as a footnote to "New Themes Entered Upon."


Hast Never Come to Thee an Hour

Whitman Archive Title: The Dalliance of the Eagles
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00184
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Dalliance of the Eagles (1880). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25.8 x 18.6 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in ink on a proof of "The Dalliance of the Eagles," "Ah, little knows the Laborer," "Hast never come to thee an hour?," and "My Picture-Gallery," are 14 words of notations in Whitman's hand. The proof has been pasted to a heavy piece of paper, on the verso of which is "A Riddle Song," part of "Italian Music in Dakota," and a clipped headline reading "The Society Articles Save Labor. Lighten the Labor for Mother."



Whitman Archive Title: Hast never come to thee an hour
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00058
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 41
Repository ID: #3829
Date: late 1870s or early 1880s
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14 x 22 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains two drafts of the poem "Hast Never Come to Thee an Hour," the first draft having been deleted with two horizontal and two diagonal pencil lines. The partly erased word "Interp[ellation?]" appears in the lower left corner. After further revision the poem appeared for the first time in the 1881 Leaves of Grass, in the cluster "By the Roadside."


He does

Whitman Archive Title: I do not expect to see myself
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00023
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Repository Title: I do not expect to see myself…
Date: 1870s
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Lightly revised manuscript fragment of approximately 42 words, written with hanging indentation and expressing a confidence in future popular acceptance. Connection with Whitman's published work is uncertain. Christopher Morley, in his foreword to the auction catalog Manuscripts, Autograph Letters, First Editions and Portraits of Walt Whitman (1936), writes that he believes that the manuscript "was written . . . on a piece scissored from left-over stock of the green wrappers and end-papers of the 1855 Leaves." The paper is actually more blue than green, however, and the handwriting is more consistent with a date in the 1870s, a period during which Whitman repeatedly complained about how he was treated by American magazines. This manuscript has been pasted to a backing sheet, and the verso is inaccessible.


He is wisest who has the most caution

Whitman Archive Title: I know as well as
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00051
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 5
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript draft treating ideas about divine revelation. Lines from this manuscript appear in the first poem in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. In its final version the poem was titled "Song of Myself," and the relevant lines appeared in section 41. The ideas and some of the language are also similar to other early manuscripts that relate to the second poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves, ultimately titled "A Song for Occupations," and part of a cluster titled "Debris" that appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass (see loc.00013, uva.00251, and duk.00261). The reverse (duk.00887) contains notes, dated March 20th '54, about the characters and physical traits of several men that Whitman met in his travels.



Whitman Archive Title: [Fa]bles, traditions, and
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00261
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 6
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The ideas and language in this manuscript relate to the first poem in 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself." This connection is reinforced by the supplied first line, added to a transcription of the manuscript that appears in Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899): "foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he was tried for forgery" (47). This line, which matches a line in the 1855 version of "Song of Myself," is not currently written on the manuscript. In language, ideas, and structure, the last few lines of this manuscript also resemble lines 39–43 in the untitled fourteenth poem of the "Debris" cluster of the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript is also similar to other early manuscripts that relate to these poems and to the second poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves, eventually titled "A Song for Occupations" (see loc.00013 ["Priests"], uva.00251 ["Do I not prove myself"], and duk.00051 ["I know as well as"]). The reverse (duk.00800) contains unrelated prose writing, including a line similar to one found in "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: Priests!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00013
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Priests! (1855). A.MS. draft.
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 10 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The general theme of this manuscript, as well as the specific wording of one of the lines, resembles a portion of the second poem in that edition, eventually entitled "A Song for Occupations": "When the sacred vessels or the bits of the eucharist, or the lath and plast, procreate as effectually as the young silvermiths or bakers, or the masons in their overalls / ... / I intend to reach them my hand and make as much of them as I do of men and women" (1855, p. 64). Language and ideas from this manuscript appear in other manuscripts that relate to the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, ultimately titled "Song of Myself." See in particular the lines: "The supernatural of no account . . . . myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes, / The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best, and be as prodigious, / Guessing when I am it will not tickle me much to receive puffs out of pulpit or print" (1855, p. 46). Based on its similarity to other manuscripts, this manuscript may also relate to lines 39-43 in "Debris," a cluster published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass: "I WILL take an egg out of the robin's nest in the orchard, / I will take a branch of gooseberries from the old bush in the garden, and go and preach to the world; / You shall see I will not meet a single heretic or scorner, / You shall see how I stump clergymen, and confound them, / You shall see me showing a scarlet tomato, and a white pebble from the beach" (1860, p. 424). On the verso (loc.07512) is a proposition for a poem "embodying the sentiment of perfect happiness." Pin marks and leftover bits of glue near the bottom of the leaf suggest it was at one point attached to something else.



Whitman Archive Title: Do I not prove myself
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00251
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8 x 18.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. In language, ideas, and structure, the manuscript most closely resembles lines 39–43 in "Debris," a poem published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. However, the ideas and some of the language are also similar to other early manuscripts that relate to the first and second poems in the 1855 edition of Leaves, ultimately titled "Song of Myself" and "A Song for Occupations" (see "Priests" [loc.00013], "I know as well as" [duk.00051], and "[Fa]bles, traditions" [duk.00261]). In his transcription of this manuscript, Richard Maurice Bucke combines it with "I ask nobody's faith" (nyp.00102), but the manuscripts do not appear to be continuous (Notes and Fragments [London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899], 25). Poetic lines written on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00568) appeared in the poem eventually titled ""Song of Myself."


Henry VII

Whitman Archive Title: Henry VII died 1509
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05548
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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."


Here the Frailest Leaves of Me

Whitman Archive Title: [Here the frailest leaves of me]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00313
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper (15 x 9.5 cm), in medium-brown ink, with one revision in the same ink. Pinholes mostly at top and in center. The two sets of verses are divided by a short horizontal line. In 1860 the first set, with the addition of a new first line ("Here my last words, and the most baffling,") became section 44 of "Calamus"; the poem was permanently retitled "Here the Frailest Leaves of Me", and the new first line dropped, in 1867. The second set was revised to form section 38 of "Calamus" in 1860; in 1867 it was further revised and retitled "Fast Anchor'd, Eternal, O Love."


Hospital Perplexity

Whitman Archive Title: [to start upon]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00247
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: between 1864 and 1874
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript fragment was originally part of a larger leaf which comprised two other fragments as well: tex.00308 and tex.00297. Before the sheet was cut into three pieces, this fragment formed the lower part. The writing it contains is related to a section headed "Fifty Army Hospitals Here—1863—Spring," a section of the article "'Tis But Ten Years Since. (Fourth Paper.)," published in the New York Weekly Graphic on February 21, 1874. Further revised, it was later published in Memoranda during the War (1875–76) as "Hospital Perplexity." This was reprinted in Two Rivulets (1876), Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), and Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [They are frequently changed]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00308
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: between 1864 and 1874
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript fragment was originally part of a larger leaf which comprised two other fragments as well: tex.00297 and tex.00247. Before the sheet was cut into three pieces, this fragment formed the middle part. The writing it contains is related to a section headed "Fifty Army Hospitals Here—1863—Spring," a section of the article "'Tis But Ten Years Since. (Fourth Paper.)," published in the New York Weekly Graphic on February 21, 1874. Further revised, it was later published in Memoranda during the War (1875–76) as "Hospital Perplexity." This was reprinted in Two Rivulets (1876), Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), and Complete Prose Works (1892).


Hospitals Ensemble

Whitman Archive Title: [to start upon]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00297
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: between 1864 and 1874
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript fragment was originally part of a larger leaf which comprised two other fragments as well: tex.00308 and tex.00247. Before the sheet was cut into three pieces, this fragment formed the upper part. The writing it contains is related to a section headed "Specimen of the Army Hospitals Now in and around Washington" in "Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers," an article published in the December 11, 1864 issue of the New York Times. Whitman also used this material in "Still More of the Hospitals," a section of the article "'Tis But Ten Years Since. (Fourth Paper.)," published in the New York Weekly Graphic on February 21, 1874. Further revised, it was later published in Memoranda during the War (1875–76) as "Aug., Sep., and Oct., '63—The Hospitals." This was reprinted, unchanged, in Two Rivulets (1876). Finally, it appeared as "Hospitals Ensemble" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and in Complete Prose Works (1892).

It is uncertain whether Whitman created this manuscript as he drafted material for the 1864 article or wrote it as he worked to synthesize earlier pieces for the "'Tis But Ten Years Since" series, though the latter scenario is more likely.



Whitman Archive Title: [Among the things arising out]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00298
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1874
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Three-page draft, heavily revised, of "Still More of the Hospitals," a section of the article "'Tis But Ten Years Since. (Fourth Paper.)," published in the New York Weekly Graphic on February 21, 1874. Further revised, it was later published in Memoranda during the War (1875–76) as "Aug., Sep., and Oct., '63—The Hospitals." Finally, it appeared as "Hospitals Ensemble" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Hours continuing long

Whitman Archive Title: Religious Canticles
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00282
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one side are notes regarding a projected group of religious poems and their significance to other Leaves of Grass poems. On the reverse is a partial draft of the 1860 poem "Calamus 9," which was dropped from subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Secrets.—Secreta."


Hours for the Soul

Whitman Archive Title: The East
Whitman Archive ID: med.00786
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: about 1882
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: An original manuscript leaf that was tipped into a copy of the Author's Manuscript Edition of The Complete Writings of Whitman, published by Putnam in 1902. The manuscript is a draft leaf which comprises a portion of "How I Still Get Around at Sixty and Take Notes. No. 6," Critic (15 July 1882). Whitman later retitled this piece and reprinted it as "Hours for the Soul" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) before including it in Complete Prose Works (1892). The manuscript incorporates three lines from "A Broadway Pageant," a poem which first appeared as "The Errand-Bearers," Brooklyn Daily Times (27 June 1860). Whitman revised the poem as "A Broadway Pageant (Reception Japanese Embassy, June 16, 1860)" in Drum-Taps (1865); reprinted it in Leaves of Grass (1867) and New York Citizen (5 September 1868). The poem first appeared under its final title in the 1871–1872 edition of Leaves of Grass.


How I Get Around at Sixty and Take Notes. (No. 1)

Whitman Archive Title: How I get around at 60 and take notes
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00214
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 123
Date: 1881
Genre: 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: A manuscript copy, with printer's instructions, of the first in a series of six articles that Whitman wrote for the Critic between January 1881 and July 1882, entitled "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes" (except for the sixth number, which was entitled "How I Still Get Around at 60, and Take Notes"). The article to which this manuscript contributed was published on January 29, 1881. A portion of the material for the article came from "Winter Sunshine," which Whitman had published in the Philadelphia Times a year earlier. The article was later broken up and reprinted in various places throughout Specimen Days (1882).


How I Get Around at Sixty and Take Notes. (No. 2)

Whitman Archive Title: By the pond
Whitman Archive ID: med.00787
Repository: Private Collection of Kendall Reed
Date: 1877–1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: As Ed Folsom notes, this manuscript "is the record of a day wandering near Timber Creek on the Stafford's farm" (see "Three Unpublished Whitman Letters to Harry Stafford and a Specimen Days Prose Fragment," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 25.4 [Spring 2008], 199). Whitman first published this material in "How I Get Around at Sixty and Take Notes. (No. 2)," Critic (9 April 1881). Most of it was later used in Specimen Days & Collect as "Horse-Mint" (1882–1883) and collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). For the complex history of how Whitman, for Specimen Days, mined his six-part Critic series on "How I Get Around," see Floyd Stovall, ed., Prose Works 1892 (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 1:347-351.



Whitman Archive Title: Distant Sounds
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00226
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Repository Title: How I Get Around and Take Notes at Sixty
Date: about 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: The fourth and fifth leaves of the printer's copy for "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes. (No. 2.)", which was published in the Critic on April 9, 1881. Though he did not include this essay as a whole in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), Whitman reprinted parts of it under different titles. The first of the sections shown here appeared as "Distant Sounds."


How mean a person is

Whitman Archive Title: How mean a person
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00523
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: How mean a person is sometimes...
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A single line concerning a "mean" person, "even in the Presidency!" The line has no known connection to any of Whitman's published works. On the back of this leaf (nyp.00079), Whitman drafted trial lines of the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." Based on this, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to before or early in 1855 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:180). The manuscript is glued to another manuscript (nyp.00524) that also features lines of prose.


How will it do for

Whitman Archive Title: [How will it do for figure?]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00372
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


human feet

Whitman Archive Title: human feet, awaits us
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05625
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


Hush'd be the Camps To-day

Whitman Archive Title: Hush'd be the camps to-day
Whitman Archive ID: rut.00001
Repository: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey: Special Collections and University Archives
Repository ID: Ac. 545
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: Draft of "Hush'd Be the Camps To-day," first published in Drum-Taps (1865). A revised version was included in the 1871–72 and subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass. Three of the leaves on which the manuscript is written are smaller and were formerly pasted to the fourth, larger leaf.


husking—"fast huskers"

Whitman Archive Title: Miscellaneous Notes
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00622
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


I admire a beautiful woman

Whitman Archive Title: I admire a beautiful woman
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00125
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: I admire a beautiful woman
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Based on the paper and ink, which are similar to those used in other early manuscripts, Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. On the back of this manuscript (nyp.00735) is a partial draft of "Memorial in Behalf of a Freer Municipal Government, and Against Sunday Restrictions," printed in the Brooklyn Star on October 20, 1854.


I am not content now

Whitman Archive Title: I am not content now
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00026
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: II-7 200
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Manuscript of two lines, the first of which bears some resemblance to a line in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself," beginning with "These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands" (1855, p. 24). An image of the verso is not available.


I am that halfgrown angry

Whitman Archive Title: Of a summer evening a
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00097
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: Of a summer evening a boy fell asleep
Date: Before 1850
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: Some of the language in this short piece of fiction also appears in the draft poem "I am that half-grown angry boy" (duk.00027). It is not possible to know with certainty whether Whitman wrote the prose or the poetic lines first. However, Whitman's usual practice of composition suggests that the prose preceded the verse. The prose is maudlin, sentimental, and conventional. The verse, though undeveloped, shows more evidence of experimentation, again suggesting a later stage in the composition process. Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the late 1840s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:46).



Whitman Archive Title: I am that halfgrown angry boy
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00027
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 25
Date: Before 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Poetry manuscript left unpublished by Whitman, containing ideas potentially connected with the unpublished short story "Of a summer evening" (duk.00097). On the reverse (duk.00885) is a fragment of an essay regarding municipal legislation.


I do not compose a

Whitman Archive Title: I do not compose
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00879
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: II. Song of Myself (Pages 1-23)
Date: About 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a prose manuscript with an unknown connection to Whitman's published work, in which he compares writing to the composition of a "grand opera." The reverse side (duk.00787) contains lines that contributed to the poem ultimately titled "Song of Myself." In the repository, this manuscript is bound, seemingly by a collector, with a printer's copy of the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass that contains numerous handwritten corrections by Whitman (duk.00098).


I do not relegate you

Whitman Archive Title: [I do not relegate you]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00035
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Children of Adam. A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1850-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 26.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These lines have an unknown relationship to Whitman's published work.


I Dream'd in a Dream

Whitman Archive Title: [I dreamed in a dream of a]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00315
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 9.5 x 9 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper cut down to 9.5 x 9 cm, in brown-black ink, with revisions in pencil. Pinholes at top and in center. Whitman numbered the leaf 13, in pencil, in the lower-left corner. The excised top portion of the leaf became the bottom section of page 2 of 1:3:11, the poem (eighth in the sequence "Live Oak, with Moss") beginning "Hours continuing long, sore/ and heavy-hearted..." In 1860 this poem was substantially revised to form section 34 of "Calamus"; in 1867 it was retitled "I Dreamed in a Dream."


I for the old round

Whitman Archive Title: [I for the old round earth]
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00022
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Preface to Leaves of Grass
Repository ID: HM 6714
Date: 1863-1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Although the repository labels this manuscript as a draft of the Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass, it appears to have been written in the mid-1860s and was potentially intended as the opening inscription to the 1867 edition of Leaves (Whitman has written "Inscription, to precede Leaves of Grass, when finished" at the top of the first leaf). While the poem in this form was never published, the line describing the Greek god Kronos as "brown-skinned" may have led to a similar description in "Chanting the Square Deific," which first appeared in Sequel to Drum-Taps in 1865.


[I have heard spars]

Whitman Archive Title: [I have heard spars]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00024
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Date: about 1872
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two lines, with revisions, possibly related to the poem "The Mystic Trumpeter," which was first published in the February 1872 issue of The Kansas Magazine. It also appeared in As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free (1872), Two Rivulets (1876), and subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass.


I Hear America Singing

Whitman Archive Title: (written for the voice)
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00272
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript note apparently recording the poet's early idea for the poem first published as "Chants Democratic 20" in 1860, later as "I Hear America Singing." This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "And there a hunter's camp," "Poem of "(the Devil," and "Poem of Sadness."



Whitman Archive Title: Mouth-Songs
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00201
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Originally numbered 54 and titled "Leaf.—". The title was next "Songs—always wanted" and then "Mouth-Songs." This poem became section 20 of "Chants Democratic" in 1860, with leaf 1 corresponding to verses 1-6 and leaf 2 ("The delicious singing of the/ mother...") to verses 8-10. In 1867 Whitman revised the first line and permanently retitled the poem "I Hear America Singing"; in 1881 it achieved its final position in the cluster "Inscriptions."


I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

Whitman Archive Title: [I saw in Louisiana a]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00316
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 15 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On two leaves of white wove paper, both 15 x 9.5 cm, in black ink, with extensive revisions in the same ink, in light brown ink, and in pencil. Pinholes mostly at top and in center of both pages. Whitman numbered the pages 2 and 3 in pencil. This was originally the second section of the sequence "Live Oak, with Moss" (one of the deleted lines reads "I write/ these pieces, and name/ them after it [the Louisiana live-oak];"), with ornamental Roman numeral. It became section 20 of "Calamus" in 1860; the lines on the first manuscript page correspond to verses 1-7, and those on the second ("It is not needed to remind/ me...") to verses 8-13. The poem was retitled "I saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" in 1867.



Whitman Archive Title: [growing]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00014
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: about 1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Five lines of the poem "I Saw in Louisiana a Live Oak Growing." This poem is part of the "Calamus" cluster, which Whitman began assembling in the summer of 1859. The reverse features a note by the poet to himself, describing the poems as "A Cluster of Poems, Sonnets expressing the thoughts, pictures, aspirations &c Fit to be perused during the days of the approach of Death."


I Saw Old General at Bay

Whitman Archive Title: I Saw Old General at Bay
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00202
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: I Saw Old General at Bay (1865). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3
Content: A draft of "I Saw Old General at Bay," first published in 1865, written on two scraps pasted together to create one leaf. Part of one scrap has been lifted to show the lines written underneath.


I Sing the Body Electric

Whitman Archive Title: A poem in which is
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00299
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 33
Date: 1856 or before
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: Notes for a poem about "a first-rate healthy Human Body," possibly related to "I Sing the Body Electric," which was first published as the fifth poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and substantially revised (as "Poem of the Body") in 1856.



Whitman Archive Title: Outdoors is the best antiseptic
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00297
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 32
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This prose fragment extols the virtues of outdoor living and the appeal of physical laborers who work outdoors. Similar ideas are found throughout Leaves of Grass. The following lines in the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself" echoes the first two sentences of this manuscript: "I am enamoured of growing outdoors, / Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, / Of the builders and steerers of ships, of the wielders of axes and mauls, of the drivers of horses" (1855, p. 21). The first part of this prose fragment also may relate to the following line from the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass: "The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people" (p. v). The transcription of the manuscript published in Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 152, includes additional text not now present in the manuscript that may also connect it to the following line in the poem eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric": "Do you think they are not there because they are not expressed in parlors and lecture-rooms?" (1855, p. 81). Edward Grier claims that this manuscript was, at one time, pinned together with another manuscript (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:169; see duk.00296).



Whitman Archive Title: Poem incarnating the mind
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00346
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks, Before 1855
Date: Before 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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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: Will you have the walls
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00085
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was preparing material for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The ideas and language in the last section of the manuscript may relate to the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The first part of this manuscript resembles a line in the fifth poem of that edition, eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric." The leaf looks like it may have been extracted from a notebook. On the reverse (nyp.00549) is prose writing that contains several phrases similar to some found in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself," as well as later poems.



Whitman Archive Title: Man, before the rage of
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00287
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Before 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: Although they are written in free verse, both the conventional nature of these lines and the handwriting suggest an early date of inscription. This draft may be a continuation of duk.00018 ("There is no word in"), suggesting it may relate to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." The lines, especially the first and third, also bear some resemblance to a passage of the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and to lines in what eventually became section 6 of "I Sing the Body Electric."



Whitman Archive Title: Talbot Wilson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00141
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 8
Folder: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, Notebooks, [1847], (80)
Date: Between 1847 and 1854
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 66 leaves, handwritten
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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: identical with the
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00878
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: Prose notes that relate to "I Sing the Body Electric," first published as the fifth poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The first line of the manuscript may relate to information Whitman used to write the article "One of the Lessons Bordering Broadway: The Egyptian Museum," published in Life Illustrated on December 8, 1855. This manuscript is pasted to a larger document along with another scrap that includes information used in that article. Both manuscript scraps were probably written shortly before or early in 1855, though the notes on the backing sheet to which they have been pasted may have been written at a later date. The reverse side of the leaf is part of a manuscript (duk.00066) discussing the conception of time.



Whitman Archive Title: undulating
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00116
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: undulating swiftly merging from womb to birth
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Language in the manuscript is similar to lines that appeared in the fifth poem in that edition, later titled "I Sing the Body Electric." The discussion of the speed of the stars in this manuscript bears some resemblance to lines in the poem ultimately titled "Song of Myself." For further discussion of the relationship between this manuscript and the 1855 Leaves of Grass, see Kenneth M. Price, "The Lost Negress of 'Song of Myself' and the Jolly Young Wenches of Civil War Washington," in Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays, ed. Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 229–30. The manuscript has been pasted down, so an image of the reverse is not currently available.



Whitman Archive Title: airscud
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00734
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: Loveaxles
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript between 1850 and 1855, as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. This list of words may have been brainstorming for lines that appeared in the first and fifth poems of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric." On the reverse (nyp.00100) is a fragment related to the poem eventually titled "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?"



Whitman Archive Title: tainting the best of the
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00524
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: Ms. leaf recto (tainting the best of the rich orchard ...)
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is similar in subject to a line from the poem eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric." On the back of this leaf (nyp.00079), Whitman drafted trial lines of the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." 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], 1:179). This manuscript is glued to another manuscript (nyp.00523) that also features lines of prose.



Whitman Archive Title: Do you know what music
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00088
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 4
Repository Title: An Essay on the Soul
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was preparing material for his first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. A portion of the first paragraph of the manuscript, dealing with music and its relationship to the soul, is similar to a passage in the poem eventually titled "A Song For Occupations." Other language in the manuscript is similar to the prose preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and to lines from the poems that would eventually be titled "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric."



Whitman Archive Title: (Of the great poet)
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00128
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 69
Date: About 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript includes notes that anticipate the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Images and phrases in the second paragraph of the first leaf are reminscent of lines in both the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself" and the poem eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric." Another line on the first leaf appeared in a slightly different form in "Poem of The Singers, and of The Words of Poems" in the 1856 edition of Leaves (a poem later titled "Song of the Answerer"). The stated desire for "satisfiers" and "lovers" (found here on the bottom of the second leaf) appears in "Poem of Many in One," also first published in the 1856 edition and later titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore."



Whitman Archive Title: [How can there be immortality]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00014
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4.5 x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These lines, appearing on a very small section of white laid paper cut and cropped irregularly, bear a strong resemblance to the (eventual) second verse paragraph in section 6 of "Starting from Paumanok," first published in 1860 as "Proto-Leaf." The fragmentary lines on the verso (beginning "Downward, buoyant, swif[t]"), represent a different version of a line incorporated in the pre-1855 notebook poem "Pictures" and of one inscribed in the 1854 notebook [I know a rich capitalist...], currently housed at the New York Public Library.



Whitman Archive Title: O Mother, did you think
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00034
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 13
Date: about 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
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Content: On four leaves, an early version of portions of the poem ultimately titled "This Compost," first printed under the title "Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of The Wheat" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. On the reverse sides of these leaves is a list of words regarding the physical body and connected in concept to "I Sing the Body Electric," a poem that first appeared as the fourth poem of the 1855 Leaves of Grass. With this list, Whitman was gathering material for the noteworthy final section, a paean to body parts, that he added to the poem in 1856. Glue residue shows that these leaves were formerly pasted to two other leaves, upon which is written a prose manuscript fragment regarding California Vigilance Committees.



Whitman Archive Title: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 7
Folder: Photocopies Notebooks [before 1855]
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 31 leaves, handwritten
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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: I subject all the teachings
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00249
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1854 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15.5 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman used language similar to what appears in these manuscript lines in the fifth poem in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric," as well as in the 1856 "Poem of the Road," eventually titled "Song of the Open Road." The manuscript is written on the blank side of an 1850s tax form from the City of Williamsburgh. 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" [loc.05354]), but as Edward Grier points out, this 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. The manuscript is thus difficult to date conclusively, but it was almost certainly written after 1854 and probably before 1860.



Whitman Archive Title: [George Walker]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00143
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 37
Folder: 1855-1856, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry trial lines
Date: between 1855-1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 45 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:226–243, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Starting from Paumanok," "A Song for Occupations," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Salut au Monde!," "To One Shortly to Die," and "A Woman Waits for Me."


I Sit and Look Out

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Sadness
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00274
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Manuscript note probably recording the idea for the 1860 poem "Leaves of Grass 17," which was ultimately titled "I Sit and Look Out." This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "And there a hunter's camp," "(written for the voice)," and "Poem of "(the Devil." An image of the verso is not available.



Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [I sit and look out upon all]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00205
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Originally numbered 77 and then changed to 78. This became section 17 of the cluster "Leaves of Grass" in the 1860 Leaves. After taking different positions in both the 1867 and 1872, it took its final place in 1881 in the cluster "By the Roadside."


I was Looking a Long While

Whitman Archive Title: [(illeg.) Dick Hunt]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00028
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: 1857 Trial Lines and Descriptions
Date: 1856-1857
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 90 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
Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 246–280, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "To a Common Prostitute," "You Felons on Trial in Courts," "Starting from Paumanok," "Trickle Drops," "I Was Looking for a Long While," "Poem of Joys," "Facing West from California's Shores," "To the States," "A Song of the Rolling Earth," "On the Beach a Night Alone," "Full of Life Now," and "With Antecedents."



Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [I was looking a long while]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00200
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Originally numbered 75; the pencil title "Leaflet" appears, deleted, in the upper-right corner. This poem became section 19 of "Chants Democratic" in 1860; in 1867 it was permanently retitled "I Was Looking a Long While," and in 1881 was assigned to the cluster "Autumn Rivulets."


Idea of a New Po[em]

Whitman Archive Title: Idea of New Po[em?]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00108
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Date: about 1875
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Brief note outlining a poem to express modern views of myth, religion, etc. Pasted at the bottom of the leaf is a clipping, taken from an unidentified newspaper, titled "King Ludwig's Latest Whim," which describes plans to move monumental religious statues to a mountain peak overlooking Oberammergau by means of a "street locomotive." The events described in the clipping occurred in 1875. It is unknown what connection, if any, this manuscript bears to published poems, though the "idea" it outlines is one that Whitman treated frequently.


If the red slayer think

Whitman Archive Title: [If the red slayer think he slays]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00205
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: I'll Trace This Garden. A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a transcription of Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem "Brahma." Written in ink on letterhead from the Attorney General's Office, where Whitman was first employed on July 1, 1865.


If you have in you

Whitman Archive Title: If you have in you
Whitman Archive ID: med.00745
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: between 1854 and 1870
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: This manuscript, the current location of which is not known, was published by Clifton J. Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 44. Edward Grier notes that Whitman visited hospitals as early as 1854, "beginning with visits to sick omnibus drivers whom he knew" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2042). The manuscript was most likely created sometime between 1854 and the years immediately following the Civil War. No connection between this manuscript and Whitman's published works has been established.


I'll trace this garden oer

Whitman Archive Title: [I'll trace this garden oer and oer]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00204
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: I'll Trace This Garden. A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in ink on letterhead from the Attorney General's Office, where Whitman was first employed on July 1, 1865, is a transcription beginning "[I'll trace this garden oer and oer]." This is Whitman's transcription, probably from memory, of "Johnny's Gone for a Soldier," a ballad popular during the American Revolution and based on the an Irish ballad entitled "Shule Agra."


Important Ecclesiastical Gathering at Jamaica, L. I.

Whitman Archive Title: Notebook Walt Whitman
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00348
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


In a poem make the

Whitman Archive Title: In a poem make the
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00278
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: before 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Note for a poem to address the question "What will be the result of this years hence?" The note is possibly related to the poem "Recorders Ages Hence," first published in Leaves of Grass (1860) as "Calamus 10," and taking its final title in 1867. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "And there," "'The Scout'," and "Drops of my Blood."


In Memory of Thomas Paine

Whitman Archive Title: [Some 35 years ago]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01076
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: 1876, Oct.2, "In Memory of Thomas Paine," signed draft
Date: 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Content: Dated "Oct 2 '76" on the last page, this manuscript is a draft of Whitman's speech on Thomas Paine, which was first published in the New York Daily Tribune (29 January 1877) as "Walt Whitman on Thomas Paine." This piece was later published in Specimen Days (1882–1883) as "In Memory of Thomas Paine" before being collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


In Nature all is so

Whitman Archive Title: In Nature all is so real
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05333
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


In Paths Untrodden

Whitman Archive Title: And now I care not to
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00031
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 195
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is an early draft of a portion of the opening poem of the "Calamus" cluster in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Beginning in the 1867 edition and for all subsequent editions the poem was titled "In Paths Untrodden." The reverse (duk.00814) contains a list of suggestions of titles for poems or clusters of poems, including "The States," "Prairies," "Prairie Spaces," "Prairie Babes," and "American Chants."



Whitman Archive Title: Calamus—1st draft p. 341 [Long I was held]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00244
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 16 x 10 cm, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript became section 1 of "Calamus" in 1860, and was retitled "In Paths Untrodden" in the 1867 Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: [June 26 '59]
Whitman Archive ID: med.00774
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: about 1859
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Edward F. Grier includes a transcription of this missing manuscript in Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York University, 1984), 405–410. Grier's transcription is pieced together from "photostats of six surviving pages" (held in the Harned collection at the Library of Congress) and from two partial transcriptions, made by Emory Holloway and currently held at the University of Kansas, as well as Clifton Joseph Furness's Walt Whitman's Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts (Harvard University Press, 1928) and Emory Holloway's The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (Doubleday, Page & Company, 1921). This manuscript includes an early draft of "In Paths Untrodden," first published as the first section of "Calamus" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Also included in this manuscript is a draft of "That Shadow My Likeness," first published in New-York Saturday Press 4 February 1860 as "Poemet." This poem later appeared as "Calamus No. 40," Leaves of Grass (1860); as "That Shadow My Likeness," Leaves of Grass (1867); and, with slight changes in the text, in Leaves of Grass (1881–1882). Other portions of this manuscript are suggestive of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", first published in New-York Saturday Press (24 December 1859) as "A Child's Reminiscence." This poem later appeared as "A Word Out of the Sea," Leaves of Grass (1860); as "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," in "Sea-Shore Memories," Passage to India (1871); and finally in "Sea-Drift," Leaves of Grass (1881–1882).


in Poem of Existence

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Existence
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00060
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 26
Date: Between 1850 and 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript of poetic lines unpublished in Whitman's lifetime. Resemblances to passages in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass are perhaps evidence that these notes constitute draft material for that edition. Another possibility is that these notes represent an attempt to recast ideas from the preface into poetry—a process that Whitman used successfully to create several new poems for the second edition of 1856. The note at the top of the manuscript lends credence to the second theory, as it follows the characteristic title structure unique to the second edition, although Whitman never published a poem under the title "Poem of Existence."


in the west

Whitman Archive Title: in the west
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00168
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: Literary, Undated, Poem of the Vision of the West
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3
Content: This manuscript contains notes for a proposed poem offering a vision of the future of the American west. The style of title that Whitman proposes ("Poem of...") resembles that employed in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, suggesting a composition date around that time. This estimate is in line with that of Edward Grier, who dates the manuscript to "before 1860" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1323).


In Western Texas

Whitman Archive Title: In Western Texas
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00101
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Note, approximately 25 words, about the Texan landscape. No relationship is known between this manuscript and Whitman's published work.


Incidents, for

Whitman Archive Title: incidents, for (Soldier in the Ranks)
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00008
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 53
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript includes both a description of the aftermath of a Civil War battle and the poem "incidents, for (Soldier in the Ranks)," which addresses "the second day of the battle" at Gettysburg.


Inscriptions

Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [What place is besieged]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00320
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of pink paper (21.5 x 13 cm), in black ink, with a fair copy of the poem at the bottom of the leaf and a deleted draft featuring heavy revisions in the same ink and in pencil at the top. This poem was originally numbered 68, and its title was "Leaflet—." In 1860 it became the second numbered verse paragraph of section 31 of "Calamus." In 1867 Whitman split up the two paragraphs and made them separate poems; these verses were moved to a position between the "Calamus" and a "Leaves of Grass" cluster and permanently retitled "What Place Is Besieged?" In 1881 the poem was transferred to the cluster "Inscriptions."



Whitman Archive Title: [Thuswise it comes]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00516
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1860–1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3
Content: One of a series of draft introductions Whitman prepared for Leaves of Grass, but which were never printed during Whitman's lifetime. This particular introduction, composed entirely in verse, is most closely related to "Inscriptions," which first appeared in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. However, no lines from this manuscript can be directly linked to any part of "Inscriptions." No other relationship to Whitman's published work is known.


Interpolation Sounds

Whitman Archive Title: [Funeral Sounds]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00200
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Funeral Sounds (1888). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Early draft of a poem that was first published as "Over and Through the Burial Chant" in 1888. It was later published with the title "Interpolation Sounds." The poem was written on the occasion of General Philip Sheridan's death in 1888.



Whitman Archive Title: Interpolation Sounds
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00090
Repository: Library of Congress: Walt Whitman Collection
Date: ca. 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An early draft of the poem "Interpolation Sounds," first published in the New York Herald on August 12, 1888 under the title "Over and Through the Burial Chant." It was publised with the revised title in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891).



Whitman Archive Title: Over and through the burial chant
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00253
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Over and Through the Burial Chant (1888). Printed Copy.
Date: 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Clipped-out copy of "Over and Through the Burial Chant" from the August 12, 1888 issue of the New York Herald, with notations in Whitman's hand. The poem was later published as "Interpolation Sounds."



Whitman Archive Title: Funeral Interpolations
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00013
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: August 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a signed draft of "Funeral Interpolations," a poem published first as "Over and Through the Burial Chant" in the New York Herald on August 12, 1888, on the occasion of General Philip Henry Sheridan's death (on August 5), and later as "Interpolation Sounds" in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891).



Whitman Archive Title: Interpolation Sounds
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00059
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Box: Manuscript box.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Fair copy draft of the poem "Interpolation Sounds". This poem first appeared without a title in the New York Herald four days after Whitman's short prose tribute to General Philip K. Sheridan, a Union general during the Civil War. It was reprinted in "Good-Bye My Fancy" in 1891, with the additional note: "General Sheridan was buried at the Cathedral, Washington, D.C. August, 1888, with all the pomp, music and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic service."


Interregnum Paragraph, An

Whitman Archive Title: Gossip of Early Candlelight
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00011
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 18
Repository Title: Gossip of Early Candle Light
Date: 1880
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Prose notes, titled "Gossip of Early Candlelight." Portions of this manuscript appeared in "An Interregnum Paragraph," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). The second leaf contains draft lines for the poem, "A Clear Midnight," see the description for ucb.00065 in this finding aid.


Intersperse here and

Whitman Archive Title: [Intersperse here and]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00300
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Date: 1850-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 5.5 cm x 8 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in ink. Pasted on top third of archival leaf.


Interviewer's Item, An

Whitman Archive Title: for Dem Vistas
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00126
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 12mo 58
Date: 1867-1870
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Although this manuscript is titled as a potential introduction or preface to Democratic Vistas or Memoranda during the War it never appeared in that format in either work. However, the thoughts it contains were echoed in an article that appeared in the St. Louis Dispatch on October 17, 1879. The article contained an interview with Whitman, in which he voiced ideas similar to those in the manuscript. A portion of the Dispatch piece would later be reprinted as "An Interviewer's Item" in Specimen Days and Complete Prose Works.


Isaac Joseph

Whitman Archive Title: Isaac Joseph Stephen Jesse
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00703
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: Isaac Joseph Stephen Jesse (my grandfather)...
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:12). In the Walt Whitman Collection at Duke, this manuscript is bound with three other manuscript leaves and two newspaper clippings, also about members of Whitman's family. It is not clear, however, whether Whitman or a collector bound the items, which are on different sizes and types of paper and appear to have been written at different times.


It has been good fun

Whitman Archive Title: [It has been good fun]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00317
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 110
Date: 1872
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Draft of a prose piece which appeared in the 17 October 1872 issue of the Washington Evening Star, under the head "Washington News and Gossip." For more on this manuscript and its contribution to this published work, see Martin G. Murray, "Walt Whitman Laughs: An Uncollected Piece of Prose Journalism," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 30 (Winter 2013), 138-149.


Italian Music in Dakota

Whitman Archive Title: The Dalliance of the Eagles
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00184
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Dalliance of the Eagles (1880). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25.8 x 18.6 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in ink on a proof of "The Dalliance of the Eagles," "Ah, little knows the Laborer," "Hast never come to thee an hour?," and "My Picture-Gallery," are 14 words of notations in Whitman's hand. The proof has been pasted to a heavy piece of paper, on the verso of which is "A Riddle Song," part of "Italian Music in Dakota," and a clipped headline reading "The Society Articles Save Labor. Lighten the Labor for Mother."



Whitman Archive Title: Italian Music in Dakota
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00003
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: between 1879 and 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This is a draft of "Italian Music in Dakota," first published in the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Italian Music in Dakota
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00080
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 153
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Corrected galley proof of the poem "Italian Music in Dakota," first published in Leaves of Grass (1881–82).


Italian singers in America

Whitman Archive Title: Italian singers in America
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00139
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 66
Date: 1858-1859
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: A manuscript containing a fairly neat draft of what is likely a piece of journalism that was never published. The piece deals with Italian opera singers in New York, a subject about which Whitman had already written in an article entitled "The Opera," which appeared in Life Illustrated on November 10, 1855. As Edward Grier notes, the date of this manuscript is either late 1858 or 1859, as Marietta Piccolomini (a singer mentioned in the piece as being "the present 'rage'") only appeared in America during that opera season (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984] 1:396).


Jan 12

Whitman Archive Title: Jan 12. Walter Whitman
Whitman Archive ID: med.00723
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: January 12, 1842
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: This manuscript consists of a note, handwritten by Whitman, in a visitor's book for Manhattan Public School #13. Whitman's entry is one of several on the page. The entry is dated January 12, and it can be inferred from the surrounding dates that the year is 1842. A photostat of the page can be found in Florence Bernstein Freedman, Walt Whitman Looks at the Schools (New York: King's Crown Press, 1950): facing page 33.


Joy, Shipmate, Joy

Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."



Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 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
Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


Kentucky

Whitman Archive Title: Kentucky
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00206
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Kentucky (1861). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1861
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 6 leaves, 11.5 x 18.5 cm to 19.5 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Content: An unfinished poem, entitled "Kentucky," the title given three times, with "By Walt Whitman" on one of the pages (see image 3). On one of the pages is a fragment on the Mississippi River, which editors (beginning with James E. Miller, Jr.) have included as the last stanza of "Kentucky" (see image 1). On the verso of another page is a cancelled portion of a letter about Jesse Whitman's employment, from which the manuscript can be dated 1861 (see image 12).


Kiss to the Bride, A

Whitman Archive Title: A Kiss to the Bride
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00207
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: A Kiss to the Bride (May 21, 1874?). Printed Copy.
Date: May, 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12.5 x 10 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A clipped copy of the poem "A Kiss to the Bride" pasted on a larger sheet with a note in Whitman's hand reading, "Marriage of Nelly Grant, (Mrs. Sartoris) the President's daughter, May 2nd, 1874." The poem was first published in the New York Daily Graphic, May 21, 1874. This clipping appears to be from the poem's reprinting, two days later, in the same newspaper.


Kosmos

Whitman Archive Title: Kosmos
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00224
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Originally numbered 55 and revised by overwriting to 56. Leaf 1 corresponds to verses 1-6 of the 1860 version, and the lines on leaf 2 ("Who out of the theory of the/ earth,...") correspond to verses 7-10. Revised very little through the different editions, "Kosmos" appeared in 1872 and 1876 in a "Leaves of Grass" group in the supplement "Passage to India." In 1881 it was finally transferred to the cluster "Autumn Rivulets" within the main body of Leaves of Grass.


L. of G.'s Purport

Whitman Archive Title: This journey
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00366
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: L. of G.'s Purport
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00364
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: This Journey
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00365
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: An Old Man's Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00230
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 36.5 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proofs of four poems pasted together and collected under the main handwritten title "An Old Man's Recitatives." The poems included are: "Ancient songs reciting" (published as "Old Chants" in 1891), "Grand is the seen" (first published in 1891), "Death dogs my steps" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), and "For us two, reader dear," first published in 1891. A note in Whitman's hand in the right margin details failed attempts to publish this grouping in Scribner's.



Whitman Archive Title: [Each claim, ideal, line]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00194
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Each Claim, ideal, Line… A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This draft appears to be trial lines for the poems "L. of G.'s Purport" and "L of G," both published in 1891. Near the middle of the page appear three underlined words, "These pages past," but whether or not they were intended as a title is unclear.



Whitman Archive Title: My Task
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00219
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: My Task (1891). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 x 22 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscripts of the following four poems, written neatly with slight corrections: "My task," "L of G's Purport," "Death dogs my steps," and "For us two, reader dear." All of the verses except "For us two, reader dear" were fused together and published as one poem entitled "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891.



Whitman Archive Title: Old-Age Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00232
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 28 x 21 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Proof pages of six poems collected under the general title "Old-Age Recitatives." The poems included are: "Old Chants" (1891), "On, On the Same,Ye Jocund Twain!" (1891), "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!" (1891), "L. of G.'s Purport" (only two lines of the twelve-line poem of the same title first published in 1891), "My task" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), and "For us two, reader dear" (1891). At the top of the first page is a note to the printer in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: Death Dogs My Steps
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00120
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Death Dogs My Steps (1890). A.MS. draft.
Date: about March 3, 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of "Death Dogs My Steps" written in ink on the inside of a discarded and opened out envelope, addressed to Whitman from England, mailed in London February 21, 1890 and postmarked received in Camden March 3, 1890. The three lines later appeared as part of "L. of G.'s Purport," first published in 1891.



Whitman Archive Title: Old-Age Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00231
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1890-1891
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 30.5 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A galley proof of a group of six poems titled "Old-Age Recitatives." The poems included are: "Sail out for good, Eidolon yacht!" (first published in 1891), "My task" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), "L. of G.'s Purport" (only the first two lines of the poem of the same title published in 1891), "Death dogs my steps" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), "For us two, reader dear" (first published in 1891), and "Grand is the seen" (first published in 1891). On the verso is a note to the printer.


Lafayette in Brooklyn

Whitman Archive Title: Lafayette in Brooklyn
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00037
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Account of the visit of Lafayette to Brooklyn in 1825
Repository ID: HM 1189
Date: 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Content: A manuscript containing the text of a address that Whitman purportedly gave at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, likely on 7 October 1881 (see Edward Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984] 1:32).


large, A

Whitman Archive Title: A large, good-looking woman
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05544
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Last Invocation, The

Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning

Whitman Archive Title: [you ye ebbing]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00086
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Last of the ebb]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00087
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Half-caught promises]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00355
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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 they sweep down and out!]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00356
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Back to these fathomless deeps returning]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00358
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Till from the ostent]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04145
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [But Liquid utterance]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04152
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Smells of the sedge and the shore]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04161
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Ebb—Tide ripples whisperings]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04174
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [With many a hurried abrupt confession]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05113
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [How ye sweep down and out!]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05117
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [waning day]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00042
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a revised draft of poetic lines that may be an early version of "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning," published as part of "Fancies at Navesink" in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. On the verso is part of a cancelled letter to Whitman. The leaf is bound with others under the title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: Last of ebb, and daylight waning
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00044
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a draft of the poem "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning," published as part of "Fancies at Navesink" in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. This manuscript is bound with others under the title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: Last of ebb, and daylight waning
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00046
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: This is a draft on three leaves of the poem "Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning," published as part of "Fancies at Navesink" in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. The manuscript has the cancelled title "At the Mouth of the River." On the reverse of the first leaf is a letter from J. M. Rollo, requesting an autograph, dated January 12, 1885. This manuscript is bound with others under the title "Fancies at Navesink."


Last of the War Cases

Whitman Archive Title: Dr. L B Russell
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05449
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [There has been [Washington, Oct. 13, 1863]]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00409
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 48
Repository Title: Last of the War Cases
Repository ID: #3829-h
Date: 1863
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript is a partial draft of "Last of the War Cases," first published in November Boughs in 1888 and later in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Ward K Armory Sq. Hosp
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05508
Repository: Library of Congress: George S. Hellman Collection
Date: about 1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This diary entry is reflected in the section of November Boughs (1888) called "Last of the War Cases." The entry for May 6, 1864, mentions a Cunningham from Ohio, most certainly the Oscar Cunningham from this diary page. "Last of the War Cases" was first published as "Army Hospitals and Cases. Memoranda At the Time, 1863–66" in Century Magazine (October 1881), and was later included in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: New York State furnished
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00087
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository Title: Fragments from his Civil War diary: autograph manuscript
Repository ID: MA 517
Date: 1863–1868
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 25 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
Content: A manuscript draft of "Army Hospitals and Cases: Memoranda at the Time, 1863–1866," Century Illustrated Magazine (October 1888), a publication which incorporates material from the "'Tis but Ten Years Since" series (specifically the fourth through the sixth papers, which appeared in the New York Weekly Graphic on 21, 28 February, and 7 March 1874, respectively) and Memoranda During the War (1875–1876). However, this manuscript does not seem to have contributed directly to this earlier series of articles or to Memoranda. This manuscript seems to be composed of selections from a Civil War journal that Whitman compiled in preparation for the Century piece, and which he also used in letters sent to his mother during the war. "Army Hospitals and Cases" was revised as "Last of the War Cases" in November Boughs (1888) before it appeared in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: July 30 1865
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02818
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [for Hospital article]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00218
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Repository Title: For hospital article…
Date: probably 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes, written on an opened-up envelope addressed to Whitman and postmarked August 1884, apparently indicating the page numbers of Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) on which appeared anecdotes that Whitman hoped to incorporate into an article about Civil War hospitals. Such an article, which uses some but not all of the anecdotes, appeared under the title "Army Hospitals and Cases. Memoranda at the Time, 1863–66" in Century Illustrated Magazine 36 (October 1888), 825–830. When it was revised and reprinted in November Boughs (1888) as Last of the War Cases: Memorandized at the time, Washington, 1865–'66, the material from Specimen Days & Collect was omitted. This version was also reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Last words

Whitman Archive Title: Recapitulation
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00208
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Last Words (1889). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of an unpublished poem which was also titled, in other manuscript drafts, "Last Words" and "The last." The draft was written on the back of an opened envelope from W. F. Woodruff.



Whitman Archive Title: Last Words
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00209
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Last Words (1889). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of an unpublished poem which was also titled, in other manuscript drafts, "The last" and "Recapitulation." The draft was written on the back of a letter from Josephine B. Kirtland.



Whitman Archive Title: Last words
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00210
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Last Words (1889). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of an unpublished poem which was also titled, in other manuscript drafts, "The last" and "Recapitulation." The draft was written on the back of a opened envelope from S. S. McClure postmarked December 8, 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: The last
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00211
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Last Words (1889). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of an unpublished poem which was also titled, in other manuscript drafts, "Last Words" and "Recapitulation." The draft was written on the back of a letter from R. M. Bucke, dated December 3, 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: ? Last Words
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00212
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Last Words (1889). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of an unpublished poem which was also titled, in other manuscript drafts, "The last" and "Recapitulation." The draft was written on the back of a letter from D. H. Kenaga, dated April 9, 1889.


Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas

Whitman Archive Title: the RR we go on
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00242
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 111
Date: 1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 8 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16
Content: Pages of notes from Whitman's western railroad journey in September 1879. The pages describe his travels through Missouri and Kansas, and large portions of the notes would find their way into Specimen Days (specifically, the sections entitled "Missouri State," "Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas," "Art Features," and "A Silent Little Follower—The Coreopsis").



Whitman Archive Title: [I had just before been for a time in Kansas]
Whitman Archive ID: pri.00032
Repository: Princeton University Library: Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
Date: 1879–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A short note in which Whitman refers to his 1879 railroad trip to Kansas. Whitman travelled west to attend the quarter-centennial celebration of the Kansas settlement and to visit his brother Jeff in St. Louis. Whitman journeyed as far as Denver and the Rockies before returning to Camden on January 5, 1880. Though no direct lines from this manuscript can be traced to Whitman's published prose, it is clear that this note is related to portions of Specimen Days, specifically the section titled, "Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas." Whitman first published this short piece in Specimen Days & Collect (1882), and reprinted it unchanged in Complete Prose (1892).


Laws for Creations

Whitman Archive Title: American Laws
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00195
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, leaf 1 19.5 x 12.5 cm, leaves 2-3 21.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: A partial horizontal line at the top of the first leaf indicates that Whitman cut away the original title and number. Whitman numbered each leaf in pencil in the lower left corner. These pages were transformed into section 13 of "Chants Democratic" in the 1860 Leaves of Grass. In 1867 it was greatly shortened and transferred to the final "Leaves of Grass" cluster. In 1872 the poem was permanently retitled "Laws for Creations" Its final position was in the cluster "Autumn Rivulets".



Whitman Archive Title: [Of Biography]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00100
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 64
Repository Title: Of Biography and of all literature and art
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a note composed around 1857-1859. It contains two phrases ("authors who considered their subject with reference to the ensemble of the world"; "every subject has been made too prononce' ") that are resonant with passages of the poem "Laws for Creation" first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass and later retained in all subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass.


Leaf for Hand in Hand, A

Whitman Archive Title: [A leaf for hand-in-hand]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00306
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14.5 x 9 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper (14.5 x 9 cm), in black ink, with revisions in pencil. Pinholes in center and at top. A blue-pencil number 3 appears in the upper right corner over an erased 9. With substantial additions and revisions this evolved into section 37 of "Calamus" in 1860; after further revision it became "A Leaf for Hand in Hand" in 1867.


Leaflets

Whitman Archive Title: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Leaves of Grass

Whitman Archive Title: Leaves of Grass.
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00522
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 p. 1., xii, (1) 14-95 p. , 30 cm., front. (port.)
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Whitman's own copy, with handwritten notes and the original pink paper covers, of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Into this copy, Whitman has tipped 8 booklets of manuscripts, 52 leaves in all, as well as typed copies of six of the booklets. The cover contains a handwritten note by Horace L. Traubel about the finding of this copy. With holograph letter of Anne Montgomerie Traubel to Oscar Lion, dated May 12, 1928, describing the finding of this copy after Whitman's death.



Whitman Archive Title: [In Poems]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00297
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Date: 1850-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 7.5 cm x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Ink on blue paper. Pasted on bottom half of archival leaf. Verso has some notes for poem "[America, so young and so magnificent]."



Whitman Archive Title: Appendage
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00111
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: Appendage
Date: 1850–1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A list of trial titles, probably for annexes or supplements to Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: The Blue Book
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00015
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 243 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 | 206 | 207 | 208 | 209 | 210 | 211 | 212 | 213 | 214 | 215 | 216 | 217 | 218 | 219 | 220 | 221 | 222 | 223 | 224 | 225 | 226 | 227 | 228 | 229 | 230 | 231 | 232 | 233 | 234 | 235 | 236 | 237 | 238 | 239 | 240 | 241 | 242 | 243 | 244 | 245 | 246 | 247 | 248 | 249 | 250 | 251 | 252 | 253 | 254 | 255 | 256 | 257 | 258 | 259 | 260 | 261 | 262 | 263 | 264 | 265 | 266 | 267 | 268 | 269 | 270 | 271 | 272 | 273 | 274 | 275 | 276 | 277 | 278 | 279 | 280 | 281 | 282 | 283 | 284 | 285 | 286 | 287 | 288 | 289 | 290 | 291 | 292 | 293 | 294 | 295 | 296 | 297 | 298 | 299 | 300 | 301 | 302 | 303 | 304 | 305 | 306 | 307 | 308 | 309 | 310 | 311 | 312 | 313 | 314 | 315 | 316 | 317 | 318 | 319 | 320 | 321 | 322 | 323 | 324 | 325 | 326 | 327 | 328 | 329 | 330 | 331 | 332 | 333 | 334 | 335 | 336 | 337 | 338 | 339 | 340 | 341 | 342 | 343 | 344 | 345 | 346 | 347 | 348 | 349 | 350 | 351 | 352 | 353 | 354 | 355 | 356 | 357 | 358 | 359 | 360 | 361 | 362 | 363 | 364 | 365 | 366 | 367 | 368 | 369 | 370 | 371 | 372 | 373 | 374 | 375 | 376 | 377 | 378 | 379 | 380 | 381 | 382 | 383 | 384 | 385 | 386 | 387 | 388 | 389 | 390 | 391 | 392 | 393 | 394 | 395 | 396 | 397 | 398 | 399 | 400 | 401 | 402 | 403 | 404 | 405 | 406 | 407 | 408 | 409 | 410 | 411 | 412 | 413 | 414 | 415 | 416 | 417 | 418 | 419 | 420 | 421 | 422 | 423 | 424 | 425 | 426 | 427 | 428 | 429 | 430 | 431 | 432 | 433 | 434 | 435 | 436 | 437 | 438 | 439 | 440 | 441 | 442 | 443 | 444 | 445 | 446 | 447 | 448 | 449 | 450 | 451 | 452 | 453 | 454 | 455 | 456 | 457 | 458 | 459 | 460 | 461 | 462 | 463 | 464 | 465 | 466 | 467 | 468 | 469 | 470 | 471 | 472 | 473 | 474 | 475 | 476 | 477 | 478 | 479 | 480 | 481 | 482 | 483 | 484 | 485
Content: Of nearly as much significance as Whitman's copy of the 1855 Leaves is his copy of the Boston, 1860-61 edition, the famous "Blue Book." It is this volume, in blue paper wrappers, that was discovered in Whitman's desk by Secretary of the Interior James Harlan, leading to Whitman's dismissal from the Department on June 30, 1865. Documenting this event in Whitman's life in Washington, the Lion Collection also includes a group of seven letters and documents relating to his work in the Departments of the Interior and Justice. Among these are Secretary Harlan's letter of dismissal, and a memorandum in Whitman's hand recording a conversation with W. T. Otto of the Department of the Interior about the finding of the "Blue Book" in Whitman's desk; images of these items are unavailable.

The book itself is heavily corrected and revised throughout in Whitman's hand, in preparation for later editions, though in fact Whitman never implemented many of the changes he contemplated. The "Blue Book" is another remarkable example of his lifelong habit of editing and rewriting his poems. The flyleaf is inscribed: "Property of Horace L. Traubel / Received from Walt Whitman May 23d 1890—W. saying: 'You fellows value these curios more than I do. This will help you to see how the book grew, if that is anything. But I guess you would know how it grew if you never possessed the book. The book is a milepost . . . This gives a glimpse into the work shop . . .'"



Whitman Archive Title: Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04749
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 21
Folder: L of G (1871). Page Proofs.
Date: 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 22 leaves, handwritten, printed
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Content: Plate proof of the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass with some corrections in Whitman's hand. Images of the versos are unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07054
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 21
Folder: L of G (1871). Plate Proofs.
Date: 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Plate proof of the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass with a few corrections in Whitman's hand. Images of the first two versos are unavilable.



Whitman Archive Title: Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00053
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 19
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16
Content: The handwritten Table of Contents of the 1881-1882 edition of Leaves of Grass with instructions to the printer. Also included is a proof of the title-page of the same edition, with Whitman's corrections.



Whitman Archive Title: Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00098
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: I-1
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 270 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Printer's copy for portions of the 1881-1882 edition of Leaves of Grass containing manuscript and printed pages with numerous corrections, additions, and instructions to the printer. A lock of Whitman's hair, enclosed in a wrapper, also appears with this collection.



Whitman Archive Title: Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00035
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 155
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 10 leaves, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: Proofs of the publisher's advertisement and the table of contents for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass, with corrections and deletions in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: Corrections in Plates
Whitman Archive ID: bpl.00005
Repository: Boston Public Library: The Walt Whitman Collection
Repository Title: Proof corrections for 'Backward Glance' etc.
Repository ID: Whitman Mss.6
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This list of corrections in Whitman's hand, including page numbers and notes, corresponds to a proof of the 1891–1892 edition of Leaves of Grass and is related to the item "[p 287]" in the same collection.



Whitman Archive Title: [p 287]
Whitman Archive ID: bpl.00002
Repository: Boston Public Library: The Walt Whitman Collection
Repository Title: Proof corrections; [Camden, N.J., 1891?]
Repository ID: Whitman Mss.4
Date: 1891
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This list of corrections in Whitman's hand, including page numbers and notes, probably corresponds to a proof of the 1891-1892 edition of Leaves of Grass. On the other side is a letter of solicitation from Henry Romeike's clipping bureau dated September 10, 1891.


Leaves of Grass [1855]

Whitman Archive Title: left with Andrew
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00001
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Song of Myself
Date: 1854 or 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript shows a listing of the poems for the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, with working titles, as well as various mathematical calculations relating to the length and arrangment of the volume. It was likely composed in 1854 or early in 1855. Ed Folsom has written at length about this manuscript and its significance. See "Walt Whitman's Working Notes for the First Edition of Leaves of Grass," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 16 (Fall 1998), 90–95. A series of draft lines on the back of this manuscript (tex.00057) relate to several of the poems that appeared in the first edition of Leaves of Grass.


Leaves of Grass [1860–1861]

Whitman Archive Title: Note Book
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04605
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Leaves of Grass. The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman As Published by a Famous Boston House. A Friendly Characterization of the Poet's Work.

Whitman Archive Title: [a thoughtful German reader]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00509
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Supplementary File
Box: 58
Folder: Leaves of Grass, 1885 edition, Manuscript page
Date: 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains notes on Leaves of Grass that appeared slightly revised in an unsigned collaborative review written jointly by Sylvester Baxter and Whitman, published in the 30 October 1881 issue of the Boston Sunday Herald under the title, "'Leaves of Grass.' The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman As Published by a Famous Boston House. A Friendly Characterization of the Poet's Work."


Leaves Supervenio

Whitman Archive Title: Leaves Supervenio
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00038
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date:
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Two trial titles, "Leaves Supervenio" and "Leaves Supervened." As Edward F. Grier writes, these titles may "refer to WW's plans about 1870 to compose a new volume of poetry."


Lesson of a Tree, The

Whitman Archive Title: for Mulleins & BB
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03401
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: 18
Date: between 1873 and 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one side of this scrap are notes about the tulip tree (Liriodendron), which Whitman used in "The Lesson of a Tree," first published in Specimen Days & Collect in 1882–1883. It was later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). The other side of the scrap bears a quotation from John Addington Symonds's Studies of the Greek Poets, the first edition of which was published in 1873.



Whitman Archive Title: The Lesson of a Tree
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00034
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 50
Repository Title: The Lesson of a Tree
Date: 1876–1877
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A partial draft of "The Lesson of a Tree," which was published as a section of Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), and collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [One lesson from studying]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00035
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Repository Title: One lesson from studying and affiliating a tree
Date: 1876–1877
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft fragment that Whitman used in slightly revised form in "The Lesson of a Tree," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) before including it in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Letter from Washington

Whitman Archive Title: [Hospitals Culpepper]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00485
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Diaries, Diary Notes, and Address Books
Box: 1
Folder: Diaries, 1863–1864, hospital notebooks (2 vols.)
Date: 1863–1864
Genre: prose
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: A Civil War diary in which Whitman recorded notes relating to his experiences in Washington D.C. during 1863. Some of these notes were used in "A Case from Second Bull Run," a short piece about the death of John Mahay, first published in the 11 December 1864 issue of the New-York Times under the title "Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers. Visits Among Army Hospitals, At Washington, on the Field, and here in New-York." Whitman included this paragraph in Memoranda During the War (1876) and Specimen Days & Collect (1882). Other portions of this diary contributed directly to Memoranda During the War and others were first published in "Letter from Washington," New-York Times, 4 October 1863.


Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whitman Archive Title: All moves unwittingly or halts
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00126
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: about 1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily revised prose notes that constitute a partial draft of the "Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson," which Whitman published in the "Leaves-Droppings" section of the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass.


Life

Whitman Archive Title: Life
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00033
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Life
Date: 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft, lightly revised, of the poem "Life," which was first published in the New York Herald on April 15, 1888. On the verso appears the handwritten date: June 8. '88.


Life and Adventures of Jack Engle

Whitman Archive Title: Nehemiah Whitman
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00556
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: A Family Record. Composed and written by Walt Whitman.
Date: Between 1845 and 1861
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript consists of notes about Whitman's family history. The various dates referenced suggest that the earliest portions of it were written sometime after 1845, and most of the notes seem to have been written at various stages between 1845 and 1855. Edward Grier dates the recto to 1850, and speculates that the earliest date for the writing on the verso is likely March 1853, when the two Cumberland Street houses were sold (Notebooks and Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:8). For footnotes relating the names listed here to Whitman, see Grier. Whitman made additions to the manuscript several times, adding to it for the last time sometime around 1861. One of the names referenced on the verso, "Covert," appears in Whitman's short story "Revenge and Requital" (1845) and his novel Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852). The name is also mentioned in an early notebook draft of the plot of Jack Engle (see "a schoolmaster").


Life and Death

Whitman Archive Title: Life and Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00213
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Life and Death (1888). A. MS. Draft.
Date: 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of "Life and Death," first published in the New York Herald in 1888.


Life Life

Whitman Archive Title: [Life]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00154
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: General Correspondence
Box: 16
Folder: Smith, Robert Pearsall. May 7, 1888.
Date: 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of an unpublished poem on the verso of an 1888 letter to Robert Pearsall Smith. The relationship of this draft to Whitman's published work is unknown.


Light & the senses abdicate

Whitman Archive Title: [Light & the senses abdicate]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00034
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Light and the senses abdicate…
Date: probably about 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript of approximately four heavily revised lines may have contributed to the poem "Chanting the Square Deific," first published in Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865–66).


Light Lives

Whitman Archive Title: [Light]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00370
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


[Like the young eagle]

Whitman Archive Title: [Like the young eagle]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00371
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Literature it is certain would

Whitman Archive Title: Literature it is certain would
Whitman Archive ID: med.00738
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Undated
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances or date of its composition. Edward Grier believed that it "probably was written in the 1850s."


Lo, space

Whitman Archive Title: Lo, space, eternal
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00098
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date:
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Three lines of poetry, with revisions. No connection to Whitman's published poetry is known.


Locusts and Katy-Dids

Whitman Archive Title: [Then the reedy monotone]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00033
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 48
Repository Title: Locusts and Katy-Dids
Date: ca. 1876–1877
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Two scraps of paper featuring notes on the "reedy monotones of the locust." Whitman included some of these lines in "Locusts and Katydids," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). "Locusts and Katydids" was later collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


long, The

Whitman Archive Title: [The long]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01779
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 41
Folder: Undated, War Notes
Date: 1861–1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines toward an unpublished poem on the "measureless history" of the trenches.


Lord Tennyson has written an

Whitman Archive Title: [Camden March 18]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00475
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 72
Repository Title: J.B. Gilder to [Walt] Whitman, 1887 March 17
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1887
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript is a response to a letter of March 17, 1887 from Joseph B. Gilder, editor of the Critic. In the letter, Gilder asked Whitman if he agreed to publish a short note about the letter that the poet had recently received from Alfred Tennyson. (Tennyson had responded to Whitman's "A Word About Tennyson," published in the Critic on January 1, 1887). Whitman agreed to the publication of such a note, followed by his ideas on how to phrase it. The note, based closely on Whitman's suggested phrasing, was published first in the Critic on March 26, 1887 and then in The Literary World on April 8, 1887.


Lucretius. De Rerum Natura

Whitman Archive Title: Lucretius. De Rerum Natura
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05547
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


main part of, A

Whitman Archive Title: A main part of the greatness
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00152
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: Box III-6A
Date: about 1857
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Handwritten notes about the ceaseless progression of humanity, most likely written in 1857. The scrap contains notes written in prose, with two poetic lines about the same subject written at the bottom of the page. The connection of these lines to any of Whitman's published poetry is unknown. An image of the verso is not available.


Maize-Tassels

Whitman Archive Title: Maize-Tassels
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00368
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Make a poem

Whitman Archive Title: [Make a poem]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00035
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Repository Title: Make a poem…
Date: probably after 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Prose fragment suggesting a poem whose "central theme" would be "the Untellable." No relationship is known between this manuscript and Whitman's published work.


Make no quotations

Whitman Archive Title: Make no quotations
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00305
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 33
Date: Between 1847 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes, or possibly trial lines, articulating various beliefs about how to write. Edward Grier speculates, based on the style and content, that this manuscript probably dates to between 1847 and 1855 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:159). This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "It seems to me," "What shall the great poet be then?," and "The most superb beauties."


Manassas, Antietam

Whitman Archive Title: Antietam, Manassas
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01780
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 41
Folder: Undated, War Notes
Date: 1870–1880
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A list of Civil War battles that includes a draft of a poetic line with no known connection to Whitman's published work.


Mannahatta [I was asking for something]

Whitman Archive Title: Mannahatta
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00217
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 5 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: A draft of the poem "Mannahatta." Whitman numbered each leaf in pencil in the lower-left corner. The leaves correspond to various verses in the 1860 edition. In the 1872 edition of Leaves of Grass the poem was transferred to a "Leaves of Grass" cluster, and in 1881 took its final position in the "From Noon to Starry Night" cluster.


Mannahatta [My city's fit and noble]

Whitman Archive Title: Mannahatta
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00214
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Mannahatta (1888). Newspaper Clipping.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A newspaper clipping of the poem "Mannahatta" on a larger page with corrections and notes in Whitman's hand. This was the second poem that title that Whitman had published (the first "Mannahatta," which begins with the words "I was asking...," first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass). This particular poem was first published in the New York Herald on February 27, 1888 and was later included in the Deathbed edition of Leaves.


man's, the

Whitman Archive Title: O blare! blare!
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00451
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 140
Date: 1850–1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A scrap of paper featuring heavily revised poetic lines. The verso contains a prose fragment, the bulk of which is struck through. The connection between these fragments and Whitman's published work is unclear.


March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown, A

Whitman Archive Title: [Surgeons operating]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00080
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [scene in the woods on]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00484
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [hear outside the orders given]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00012
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Five partly cropped lines from a draft of the poem "A March in the Ranks Hard-Pressed, and the Road Unknown," first published in Drum-Taps in 1865. The manuscript on the reverse side, tex.00461, is perhaps related to the essay "The Real War will never get in the Books," published in Specimen Days (1882–83).


Mature Summer Days and Nights

Whitman Archive Title: The wild carrot
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00098
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 67
Repository Title: The Wild Carrot
Date: 1878–1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript consists of three smaller scraps of paper that have been pasted together to form a larger sheet. The first part of this manuscript was slightly revised and used nearly verbatim in "Mature Summer Days and Nights." The second and third scraps were revised and contributed to "Distant Sounds." Both of these prose pieces first appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), and were included in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [in the brook]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00074
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 44
Repository Title: Mature Summer Days and Nights
Date: 1878–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript is a draft of "Mature Summer Days and Nights," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Me Imperturbe

Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [Me imperturbe!]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00199
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Originally numbered 73. This poem became section 18 of "Chants Democratic" in 1860; in 1867 it was permanently retitled "Me Imperturbe," and after various repositionings, was finally transferred to the cluster "Inscriptions" in 1881.


Meadow Lark, A

Whitman Archive Title: [By the Creek]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00066
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 38
Repository Title: A Meadow Lark
Date: 1878–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes on the meadow lark, dated 16 March 1878. This manuscript contributed to "A Meadow Lark," which first appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), and was collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Mediums

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Materials
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00042
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 12mo 15
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains notes for poetry, including phrases which appear in section 6 of the final version of"Starting from Paumanok" and in "Mediums." The published version of "Mediums," originally "Chants Democratic No. 16" in the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass, later appeared as part of "Passage to India" (1871–1872), and finally in the 1881–1882 edition of Leaves of Grass. "Starting from Paumanok" was published first in the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass as "Proto-Leaf." The reverse is a prose fragment dealing with political independence that contains phrases and ideas similar to those found in Whitman's complete but unpublished essay "The Eighteenth Presidency!"



Whitman Archive Title: Mediums
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00197
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript draft became section 16 of "Chants Democratic" in 1860, with Leaf 1 corresponding to verses 1-6 and Leaf 2 ("They shall train themselves/ to go in public,...") to verses 7-11. In 1867 Whitman restored the title "Mediums"; in 1871, the poem was transferred to Passage to India, and in 1881 took its final position in the cluster "From Noon to Starry Night."


Memoranda During the War

Whitman Archive Title: [It is among these]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00090
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Repository Title: It is among these, or some one of these…
Date: undated
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two small scraps pasted together. On one side is a sentence describing Whitman's visits in Civil War hospitals, probably drafted for Memoranda During the War (1875–76). On the reverse are three words/fragments of words, which bear an uncertain relationship to Whitman's published writing.



Whitman Archive Title: [Most all of the wounds very bad]
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00041
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Notes on hospital experiences
Repository ID: HM 6708
Date: 1862-1874
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: A manuscript describing Whitman's time spent in the army camps and hospitals near Fredericksburg in late December, 1862. The manuscripts are fairly neat and on the verso on the fourth leaf Whitman has written "Proofs," indicating that these were likely handwritten proofs for one of the several newspaper articles that Whitman published about these experiences, articles that would later be incorporated into Memoranda During the War. Some of the lines here first appeared in "Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers," published in the New York Times on 11 December 1864, and were later reprinted in a series of articles written for the New York Weekly Graphic in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: Bed 37
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00027
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Date: 1863
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes made about a visit to Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C. in 1863. Revised versions of these lines were published in "'Tis But Ten Years Since (Fourth Paper)", the fourth of six articles about the Civil War that Whitman published in the New York Weekly Graphic in January and February, 1874. The fourth number appeared on 21 February 1874. The articles were later gathered and republished as Memoranda During the War in 1875.



Whitman Archive Title: A Night Battle in the late War
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00031
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 135
Date: 1863
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: This is a brief note, dated May 2, 1863 and titled "A Night Battle in the late War." The night battle to which this note refers is probably the battle of Chancellorsville. Similar phraseology appeared in Memoranda During the War (1875–76), in the section headed " May 12—A Night Battle, Over a Week Since."



Whitman Archive Title: [Hospitals Culpepper]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00485
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Diaries, Diary Notes, and Address Books
Box: 1
Folder: Diaries, 1863–1864, hospital notebooks (2 vols.)
Date: 1863–1864
Genre: prose
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: A Civil War diary in which Whitman recorded notes relating to his experiences in Washington D.C. during 1863. Some of these notes were used in "A Case from Second Bull Run," a short piece about the death of John Mahay, first published in the 11 December 1864 issue of the New-York Times under the title "Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers. Visits Among Army Hospitals, At Washington, on the Field, and here in New-York." Whitman included this paragraph in Memoranda During the War (1876) and Specimen Days & Collect (1882). Other portions of this diary contributed directly to Memoranda During the War and others were first published in "Letter from Washington," New-York Times, 4 October 1863.



Whitman Archive Title: For Note
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01552
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Brooklyn, Jan 19 & 20, 1865
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00152
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 56
Date: 1865
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman's response to learning of George Whitman's imprisonment at Danville during the Civil War. This manuscript contains much of the same information about George and his status as a prisoner of war that Whitman published in "A Brooklyn Soldier, and A Noble One," which appeared in the 19 January 1865 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Material in this manuscript also contributed to "The Fifty-first New-York Volunteers," published in the New-York Times, 24 January 1865 as well as portions of Memoranda During the War (1875–76).



Whitman Archive Title: [(Major) Col. Clifton K. Prentiss]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01784
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 41
Folder: Personal, Aug 20 1865, Death of Clifton K. Prentiss
Date: 1865–1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes on the Death of Clifton K. Prentiss, which were revised and appeared in Memoranda During the War (1875–1876) before being collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [for introductory to]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00251
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: probably between 1868 and 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Fragmentary draft of an introductory essay that was apparently never published. The note at the top suggests that it was intended for some version of Democratic Vistas, which was first published in 1871, or of Memoranda during the War, which was first published in 1875–76. The idea expressed in this manuscript occurs frequently in Whitman's published writings, though never in these particular phrases.



Whitman Archive Title: [in life]
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00051
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: [Memoranda During the War]
Repository ID: HM 16537
Date: 1873-1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript fragment that, on the recto, contains lines similar to those found in the opening paragraph of Memoranda During the War (1875), and may have been an alternate or earlier version of that introduction. The paragraph first appeared in a slightly different form in the New York Weekly Graphic on 24 January 1874, part of a five-part series about the war that Whitman published in that paper. The verso contains lines which appear in the final paragraph of Whitman's introduction to Memoranda, and were likely written later than the lines on the recto.


Memorandum at a Venture, A

Whitman Archive Title: [True, I could not construct]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05856
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "Complete Human Identity," draft
Date: about 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A heavily revised, partial draft of "A Memorandum at a Venture," first published in the June 1882 issue of North American Review.



Whitman Archive Title: I think the principal obstacle
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00422
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 140
Date: 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman's notes on the "treatment of sex" as the chief obstacle to the advancement of women's rights, pasted to a backing sheet with a clipping of "What Women Can Do" from the New York Herald 17 April 1882. Portions of this manuscript were revised and used in "A Memorandum at a Venture," first published in the June 1882 issue of the North American Review. This essay was reprinted in Specimen Days (1882).


Memorial in Behalf of a Freer Municipal Government, and Against Sunday Restrictions

Whitman Archive Title: The true friends of the
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00938
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 10
Date: Between 1850 and 1854
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is a partial draft of "Memorial in Behalf of a Freer Municipal Government, and Against Sunday Restrictions," a public letter printed in the Brooklyn Star on October 20, 1854. Whitman probably drafted the manuscript shortly before the piece was published. On the reverse (duk.00259) are draft lines that contributed to the final poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, later titled "Great Are the Myths."



Whitman Archive Title: that it fibre and strengthen
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07869
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Song of Myself (1855). A.MS. draft.
Date: About 1854
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is a partial draft of "Memorial in Behalf of a Freer Municipal Government, and Against Sunday Restrictions," a public letter printed in the Brooklyn Star on October 20, 1854. Whitman probably drafted the manuscript shortly before the piece was published. On the verso (loc.00042) is a draft related to the poetry of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855).



Whitman Archive Title: just as much here directly
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00735
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: just as much here directly at our doors
Date: 1854
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is a partial draft of "Memorial in Behalf of a Freer Municipal Government, and Against Sunday Restrictions," a public letter printed in the Brooklyn Star on October 20, 1854. Whitman probably drafted the manuscript shortly before the piece was published. Three draft lines of poetry are written on the back of the manuscript (nyp.00125).


Memories

Whitman Archive Title: Memories
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00215
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Memories (1888). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A nearly final draft of the poem "Memories," first published in 1888.


Messenger Leaves

Whitman Archive Title: To You
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00216
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 9 x 12.5 pasted to 20 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Beneath the pasted-over section can be discerned a second title, also "To You," with the number 91 (mended from 90). In the 1860 Leaves of Grass Whitman divided the poems again, publishing them in reverse order under the same titles at the end of the cluster "Messenger Leaves." Section 1 was eventually published (1881) as one of the poems in the cluster "Inscriptions," but Whitman dropped section 2 from his published poems after an 1876 appearance in the supplement "Passage to India."


Million Dead, too, Summ'd up, The

Whitman Archive Title: [Write a piece for address]
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00019
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: The dead in this war
Repository ID: HM 1194
Date: between 1864 and 1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Notes about death during the U.S. Civil War, apparently intended for a projected lecture that never materialized. Whitman used these notes for the short essay "The Million Dead, too, summ'd up—The Unknown," which was first published in Memoranda During the War (1875–76).



Whitman Archive Title: The Dead of This War
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00092
Repository: Library of Congress: John D. Batchelder Collection
Date: 1865-1875
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript, seemingly drafted as poetry, that contains several lines and phrases that appear as prose in "The Million Dead, Too, Summ'd Up," a section of Memoranda During the War (1875-76).



Whitman Archive Title: [—the Sacred Million]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00244
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Several trial phrases regarding the "millions" killed during the Civil War. This material appeared in "The Million Dead, too, summ'd up—The Unknown" in Memoranda during the War (1875–76), an essay later reprinted as "The Million Dead, Too, Summ'd Up" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and Complete Prose Works (1892). The manuscript leaf is pasted to a backing sheet, making the reverse side inaccesssible.


Miracles

Whitman Archive Title: Poem incarnating the mind
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00346
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: The genuine miracles of Christ
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01019
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "The Genuine Miracles of Christ," draft
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This cancelled prose manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855. Language in the manuscript was used in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." Segments of the manuscript also resemble language that appeared in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and in the 1856 "Poem of Perfect Miracles," later titled "Miracles." The wording of "the vast elemental sympathy, which, only the human soul is capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods," was used, slightly revised, in "A Song of Joys," which first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as "Poem of Joys."



Whitman Archive Title: Such boundless and affluent souls
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00017
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: II-7C 201
Date: Between 1850 and 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: The second paragraph of this manuscript contains phrases and ideas similar to lines from the poem "Miracles," in particular the phrase "Every hour of the day and night, and every acre of the earth and shore . . . ." The poem was first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, where it was titled "Poem of Perfect Miracles." The title was changed to "Miracles" in the 1867 edition of Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: [after all]
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00001
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 50
Date: between about 1855 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is written on a green sheet used for the endpapers of the first edition of the Leaves of Grass (1855), an edition that begins with a ten-page statement in prose, originally untitled and later known generally as the 1855 Preface. This manuscript seems to represent an early attempt by Whitman to recast the 1855 prose Preface into poetry. The 1860–61 edition of Leaves of Grass introduced two new poems created in this way: "Poem of Many in One" (later "By Blue Ontario's Shore") and "Poem of the Last Explanation of Prudence" (later "Song of Prudence"). Neither of the published poems incorporates lines from this manuscript, though it and "Song of Prudence" are drawn from adjacent portions of the 1855 Preface.



Whitman Archive Title: 9th av.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00354
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Undated Thoughts, Ideas, and Trial lines (3 V.)
Date: between 1854 and 1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 45 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
Content: An early notebook Whitman used for various purposes. William White, in his edition of Whitman's Daybooks and Notebooks (New York: New York University Press, 1978. 3 vols.), noted a relationship between rough drafts of poems in this notebook (called "An Early Notebook" in White's edition) and the 1860 poem eventually titled "Starting from Paumanok." On surface 54 is a passage that seems to have contributed to the 1860 poem that became "Song at Sunset." On surface 85 is a passage that perhaps contributed to the 1855 poem later titled "Song of Myself," and a passage on surface 62 might have been used in the 1856 poem eventually titled "Miracles." Because Whitman wrote entries from both ends of the notebook, the writing on about half of the leaves is upside-down in relation to other leaves. Some leaves have become disbound, and their original positions are uncertain. Our ordering is based on the earliest known transcription, done by Fredson Bowers in 1955.



Whitman Archive Title: [sea—cabbage]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00093
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: sea-cabbage
Date: 1855—1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A list of words and notes, mostly related to the sea. The last line of this manuscript is similar to a line Whitman used in "Miracles." Compare the draft line, "sound of walking barefoot ankle deep in the edge of the water," with the published line, "or wade with naked feet along the beach, just in the edge of the water." "Miracles" first appeared in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass under the title, "Poem of Perfect Miracles."


Missouri State

Whitman Archive Title: the RR we go on
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00242
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 111
Date: 1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 8 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16
Content: Pages of notes from Whitman's western railroad journey in September 1879. The pages describe his travels through Missouri and Kansas, and large portions of the notes would find their way into Specimen Days (specifically, the sections entitled "Missouri State," "Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas," "Art Features," and "A Silent Little Follower—The Coreopsis").



Whitman Archive Title: Missouri Kansas trip
Whitman Archive ID: nby.00002
Repository: Newberry Library
Repository Title: Notes and fragments: left by Walt Whitman and now edited by Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, one of his literary executors
Repository ID: Case folio Y 245.W5918
Date: 1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A brief note from Whitman's 1879 trip to attend the quarter-centennial celebration of the Kansas settlement and to visit his brother Jeff in St. Louis. Whitman journeyed as far as Denver and the Rockies before returning to Camden on January 5, 1880. Whitman first described this trip in Specimen Days & Collect (1882), and though no direct lines can be traced between this manuscript and Whitman's published prose, it is clear that these manuscript notes are related to portions of Specimen Days, specifically the section titled, "Missouri State." This manuscript is mounted in a copy of Notes and Fragments (1899), leaving the verso unavailable..


money value of real, The

Whitman Archive Title: The money value of real
Whitman Archive ID: rut.00024
Repository: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey: Special Collections and University Archives
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This prose note, discussing the relationship between monetary value and "the human spirit," has no known connection to Whitman's published work. The material on the back of the leaf, which was included in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, suggests that the manuscript was written before 1855. The manuscript is held at Rutgers University Library along with several similar manuscripts that probably date from around or before 1855. This prose note has no known connection to Whitman's published work. The material on the back of the leaf, which was included in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, suggests that the manuscript was likely written before 1855. The manuscript is held at Rutgers University Library along with several similar manuscripts that are numbered sequentially and probably date from around or before 1855: see "American literature must become distinct" (rut.00010), "dithyrambic trochee" (rut.00022), and "The only way in which" (rut.00023).


Mother's family lived only two

Whitman Archive Title: Mother's family lived
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00205
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS f 128
Date: 1850
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript containing autobiographical notes about Whitman's family history. Although Whitman never published any of these notes in his lifetime, they were used, in some cases word for word, in the biographical introduction to the multi-volume The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman, edited by Whitman's three literary executors and published in 1902. Horace Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas Harned are listed as the authors of the introduction. Large portions of the recto are used nearly verbatim, but only certain phrases from the verso. The finding aid from the repository lists the date of this manuscript as 1850.


Mothers precede all

Whitman Archive Title: Mothers precede all
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00296
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Date: 1850-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8 cm x 13.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Pencil on verso of envelope.


Municipal legislation

Whitman Archive Title: Municipal legislation
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00885
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: I am that half grown angry boy
Date: Between 1840 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1840s or 1850s. He also notes that this manuscript did not contribute to the editorial entitled "Municipal Government" that appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Times on December 1, 1858 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:345). On the reverse side (duk.00027) is a poetry manuscript containing ideas possibly connected to Whitman's unpublished short story "Of a summer evening."


My 71st Year

Whitman Archive Title: My 71st Year
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00218
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: My 71st Year (1889). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 18.75 x 20.25 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A proof sheet of "My 71st Year," first published in 1889, with multiple corrections and notations in Whitman's hand. The proof is printed on the verso of a page titled "Principles of the Republican and Democratic Parties."



Whitman Archive Title: My 71st Year
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00340
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: My 71st Year (1889). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 11.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof sheet of "My 71st Year" with revisions. "My 71st Year" was first published in 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: My 71st Year
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02503
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: My 71st Year (1889). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 11.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof sheet of "My 71st Year" with revisions. "My 71st Year" was first published in 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: My 71st Year
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02504
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: My 71st Year (1889). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 11.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Proof sheet of "My 71st Year" with revisions. "My 71st Year" was first published in 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: My 71st Year
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02505
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: My 71st Year (1889). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 11.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof sheet of "My 71st Year" with revisions. This proof has a note by Traubel reading "see notes, Oct. 31, 1889." "My 71st Year" was first published in 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: MY 71st YEAR
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00036
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Repository Title: MY 71st YEAR
Date: 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, proof with revisions
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Corrected proof of "My 71st Year," which appeared in the November 1889 issue of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine.



Whitman Archive Title: My 71st Year
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04098
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: My 71st Year (Nov. 1889). Printed copies.
Date: November, 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: , printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3
Content: Two copies of the November, 1889 issue of The Century Magazine, (one full, one partial) which included Whitman's poem "My 71st Year." There are a few small notes, probably not in Whitman's hand, which read "Nov 1889" and "Mark Twain" (Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is also serialized in this issue). Currently, images of only three pages of one of the copies are available (cover, table of contents, and the page on which "My 71st Year" is printed).


My Canary Bird

Whitman Archive Title: My Canary Bird
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00004
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 6
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a manuscript draft of the poem, "My Canary Bird," which was first published in the New York Herald on March 2, 1888. Reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888).


My Legacy

Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 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
Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


My Native Sand and Salt Once More

Whitman Archive Title: July 25 '81—Far Rockaway LI
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00086
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 55
Repository Title: My Native Sand and Salt Once More
Date: 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: A draft of "My Native Sand and Salt Once More," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and included in Complete Prose Works (1892).


My Picture-Gallery

Whitman Archive Title: And to me each minute
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00057
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Song of Myself
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript includes lines that relate to the prose preface and to several of the poems in that edition, including the poems eventually titled "Song of Myself," "To Think of Time," and "A Song for Occupations." The manuscript also includes lines that relate to the manuscript poem "Pictures,"" which probably dates to the mid- to late 1850s. Notes about the arrangement and production of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass are written on the back of this manuscript.



Whitman Archive Title: Living Pictures
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00516
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Repository Title: "A Cluster of poems" and "Living Pictures"
Date: Before 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The handwriting and Whitman's use of the long "s" in several of the words suggest that this is an early manuscript. It is possible that these lines are early notes for the second poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "A Song for Occupations." This manuscript may also relate to yal.00081 ("Pictures"), a lengthy manuscript poem held at the Beinecke Library at Yale University that was probably written in the mid- to late-1850s. On the back of this leaf (uva.00086) is a list, almost certainly written later than the prose on the front, of subjects on which to write "a cluster of poems."



Whitman Archive Title: [See there is Epicurus]
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00006
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 58
Date: about 1857
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: This manuscript includes three lines of poetry on a trimmed sheet of paper. This appears to be one of a group of manuscripts related to the poem, unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, with the manuscript title, "Pictures." Whitman used lines from "Pictures" for the poem "My Picture-Gallery," first published in Leaves of Grass (1881).



Whitman Archive Title: something that presents the sentiment
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00110
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A line in this manuscript appears in a long manuscript poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures." The first several lines of that poem were revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880. The notes written in ink on this manuscript probably relate to the poem that was eventually titled "Salut au Monde!" first published as "Poem of Salutation" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. The earlier lines written in pencil may relate to the sixth poem in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Faces." These connections suggest the manuscript was probably written in the early to mid-1850s. The manuscript is pasted down, so an image of the reverse is not currently available.



Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Pictures
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00289
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Repository Title: Leaves of Grass, [ca. 1855–1856], AMs, 12 fragments on 7 leaves
Date: Before 1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A phrase beginning "Picture of one of/ the Greek games" appears in the upper right corner, delimited from the rest of the notes with two curved lines. The words "Spanish bull fight" appear in their own semicircle (damaged by Whitman's cutting) in the lower right corner. The lines seem to occupy a middle space between the very early notebook poem "Pictures" and the 1856 "Poem of Salutation" (ultimately "Salut au Monde!"). Therefore, the date of this manuscript is likely before 1856.



Whitman Archive Title: [The circus boy is riding in the]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00010
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 10.5 x 14 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The verso lines (beginning with the individually deleted line "O Walt Whitman, show us some pictures!" and continuing "America, always Pictorial!") represent a later draft of the beginning of the poem "Pictures" than the most complete extant version, which is contained in the pre-1855 "Pictures" notebook currently housed at Yale University. Critics have dated the lines to around 1880, when Whitman was working on a short version of "Pictures" both for magazine publication and for the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass, where it was published as "My Picture-Gallery." But Whitman's early style of inscription in this draft, along with the line "It is round—it has room for America, north and south" and his use of his own name in the deleted first line, all suggest that Whitman may have inscribed this draft around the same time that he was working on the new 1856 "Poem of Salutations" (eventually "Salut au Monde!"). This draft also suggests that at one point he may have considered linking what would become "Poem of Salutations" and the formally and thematically similar "Pictures" more directly. The lines on the recto, divided by a horizontal line, refer to images of a circus boy on a fleet horse and of watching those on a shore disappear. The relationship between either of these lines and Whitman's published works is unclear.



Whitman Archive Title: Hear my fife
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00565
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the 1850s. The lines are versions of a line in a long manuscript poem titled "Pictures" (yal.00081), which probably dates to the mid- to late 1850s. Based on the first-person perspective in these draft lines, Emory Holloway has speculated that they likely were written after the line in "Pictures" (Pictures: An Unpublished Poem of Walt Whitman [New York: The June House, 1927], 31). The first several lines of "Pictures" (not including this line) were eventually revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880. The poem was later published in Leaves of Grass as part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster. Lines on the back of this leaf (uva.00260) appeared, in revised form, in the poem eventually titled "The Sleepers."



Whitman Archive Title: Pictures
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00081
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 137
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 27 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
Content: Bound draft of a poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures." The first several lines of draft were revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880.



Whitman Archive Title: In the gymnasium
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00452
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 140
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early to mid-1850s. Versions of these lines appeared in a long manuscript poem titled "Pictures," which probably dates to the mid- to late 1850s. The first several lines of "Pictures" (not including these lines) were eventually revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880. The poem was later published in Leaves of Grass as part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster. Poetic lines drafted on the back of this manuscript leaf (yal.00483) likely contributed to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: My picture gallery
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00061
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 58
Repository ID: #3829
Date: between 1850 and 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 10 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Originally titled "Pictures," this manuscript is a revision of the first four verses of a draft poem by that name, inscribed by Whitman in a twenty-nine page notebook before the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855. The notes "? for children" and "extend this?" appear in the upper left corner. The final verse appears in the upper right corner. After further revision Whitman published these verses in the October 30, 1880 issue of The American under the title "My Picture-Gallery," after which he placed it in the new cluster "Autumn Rivulets" in the 1881 edition.



Whitman Archive Title: The regular old followers
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00024
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks c. 1854–1855
Date: Between 1853 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 12 leaves, handwritten
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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: I know a rich capitalist
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00129
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Emory Holloway has pointed out that Whitman's reference to the sinking of the San Francisco indicates that this notebook, "or at least part of it, is later than 1853." He writes that "it was probably begun in 1854" because the "marble church" in the first passage presumably refers to the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, "which was not completed until then." See Holloway, "A Whitman Manuscript," American Mercury 3 (December 1924), 475–480. See also Andrew C. Higgins, "Art and Argument: The Rise of Walt Whitman's Rhetorical Poetics, 1838-1855," PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1999; and Edward F. Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:128–135. Of the notebook passages that can be identified with published works, most represent early versions of images and phrases from the 1855 poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." One passage clearly contributed to the 1856 poem later titled "Song of the Open Road." Others are possibly connected to the poems eventually titled "A Song for Occupations" and "Great Are the Myths," both first published in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and to the preface for that volume. One passage seems to have contributed to the 1860–1861 poem that Whitman later titled "Our Old Feuillage." One passage is similar to a line in a long manuscript poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures". The first several lines of that poem (not including the line in question) were revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880 and then in Leaves of Grass as part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster (1881–1882, p. 310). No image of the outside back cover of the notebook is available because it has been stitched into a larger volume.



Whitman Archive Title: The Dalliance of the Eagles
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00184
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Dalliance of the Eagles (1880). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25.8 x 18.6 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in ink on a proof of "The Dalliance of the Eagles," "Ah, little knows the Laborer," "Hast never come to thee an hour?," and "My Picture-Gallery," are 14 words of notations in Whitman's hand. The proof has been pasted to a heavy piece of paper, on the verso of which is "A Riddle Song," part of "Italian Music in Dakota," and a clipped headline reading "The Society Articles Save Labor. Lighten the Labor for Mother."


my two theses

Whitman Archive Title: [My two theses]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00009
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: about 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4 x 16 cm pasted to 10.5 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On a small composite leaf of white wove paper, ruled in blue on one side, containing notes about developing two theses to "run through all the poems . . .."


Myself and Mine

Whitman Archive Title: The regular old followers
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00024
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [most poets finish single specimens of]
Whitman Archive ID: bpl.00004
Repository: Boston Public Library: The Walt Whitman Collection
Repository Title: Notes on his poetry and Heine
Repository ID: Whitman Mss.3
Date: 1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A group of several notes, all concerned with the general topics of the character and social position of the poet. The sentences pencilled at the top of the page contributed to the poem "Myself and Mine," first published in 1860 as "No. 10" in the "Leaves of Grass" cluster. The list of seven attributes that is written in the middle of the page formed the basis for a stanza of "Poem of The Singers, and of The Words of Poems," published in 1856 and later combined with one of the 1855 poems to become "Song of the Answerer." Pasted to the manuscript is a clipping, annotated and dated June 1856, about Hungarian literary nationalism, and at the bottom of the page are notes on the German poet Heinrich Heine.


Mystic Trumpeter, The

Whitman Archive Title: Theme for piece
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00045
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 22
Date: about 1869
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An outline for a poem on various types of music, potentially related to "Proud Music of the Storm" and/or "The Mystic Trumpeter." The poem "The Mystic Trumpeter" was first published in The Kansas Magazine of February 1872. "Proud Music of the Storm" was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1869. The reverse contains cancelled notes about a stanza to describe a triumphal instrumental and vocal chorus corresponding to that of man triumphing over temptation and weakness.



Whitman Archive Title: [Hark! some wild trumpeter]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00098
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 59
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: about 1872
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 9 leaves, 25 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: "The Mystic Trumpeter" was first published in the February 1872 issue of The Kansas Magazine, after which Whitman published it in the 1872 book As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free, in the 1876 Two Rivulets, and in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. There and in later editions the poem was included in "From Noon to Starry Night." Other drafts of the poem are housed in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection at the Library of Congress, the Trent Memorial Collection at Duke University, and the T.E. Hanley Collection at the University of Texas.



Whitman Archive Title: [Hark! some wild trumpeter—]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00221
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Mystic Trumpeter (1872). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: between 1871-1872
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 23 leaves, largest 37.5 x 20.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: Held together loosely by a cover onto which a scrap of paper was pasted as a label, inscribed by Walt Whitman: "Hark! some wild trumpeter—." On verso of cover: "Advertising book of the Daily Freeman." At head in Whitman's hand: "Original rough draught and Memoranda of Mystic Trumpeter." Three pages of memoranda consist of trial lines and lists of words to be used in the poem. The first page is signed by Whitman. Mostly written in ink on versos of Department of Justice stationery. Many corrections in pencil, indelible pencil, or red ink. "The Mystic Trumpeter" was first published in 1872.



Whitman Archive Title: [Now, trumpeter]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00081
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: bv2
Folder:
Repository Title: The Mystic Trumpeter
Date: about 1872
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Nine draft lines, uncorrected, of section 8 of "The Mystic Trumpeter," a poem first published in The Kansas Magazine in February 1872. It was reprinted in As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free (1872), Two Rivulets (1876), and subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass. On the verso, someone—perhaps a collector or archivist—jotted a note about "From Noon to Starry Night" and "The Mystic Trumpeter."



Whitman Archive Title: The mystic Trumpeter
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04099
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: The Mystic Trumpeter (1873). Printed copies in Hungarian
Date: January 19, 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 43.5 x 30 cm, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A copy of the Budapest newspaper Fovarosi Lapok of January 19, 1873 containing Whitman's poem "The Mystic Trumpeter" in Hungarian and an interview with the poet by Liptay Pal. At the top, written in pencil, are notes in Whitman's hand.


name of this tells, The

Whitman Archive Title: The name of this
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00127
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 63
Date: between 1884 and 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Four leaves that constitute a draft, unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, apparently of a preface to a projected volume. Also included is a note, in an unknown hand, quoting Richard Maurice Bucke's note from the posthumous publication "Notes and Fragments" (1899). An image for the verso of this note is unavailable.


Names or terms get helplessly

Whitman Archive Title: Names or terms
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05640
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


names the Niam-Niams

Whitman Archive Title: names
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00015
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 140
Date: Between 1850 and 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a note in Whitman's handwriting which names various tribes of people, including "the Niam-Niams," "the Battas," "the Tonga-Taboos," and "the Aleuts"; also included in this note is the address of John P. Soule, a Boston "photographer and publisher." The relationship of this note to Whitman's published work is unknown. Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates the note to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 5:1663). The name and address, however, were added later, likely in 1881, when Whitman visited Boston several times, first to deliver a lecture and then to oversee the production of the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. Although Whitman also visited Boston in 1860, John Soule's photography studio did not move to 338 Washington Street, the address that Whitman lists, until the 1870s.


National Uprising and Volunteering

Whitman Archive Title: Make a conclusion
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01554
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


Nationality—(and Yet)

Whitman Archive Title: [Two powerful & perhaps paradoxical]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00314
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: The idea that democracy includes the two seemingly opposite forces of individualism and group identity, expressed in this manuscript fragment, can be found in many of Whitman's published works. The comparison to centrifugal and centripetal physical forces suggests that this manuscript possibly contributed to "Nationality—(and Yet.)," which was first published in Two Rivulets (1876). It was later republished in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and in Complete Prose Works (1892). The leaf has been pasted to a backing sheet, rendering the verso inaccessible.


Native Moments

Whitman Archive Title: [Now the hour has come upon me]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00182
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, leaf 1 18.5 x 16 cm, leaf 2 11 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This poem, numbered 82 in pencil, became main section 8 of "Enfans d'Adam" in 1860, and was permanently retitled within the group "Native Moments" in 1867.


Nay, Tell Me Not To-day the Publish'd Shame

Whitman Archive Title: Nay, Tell Me Not To-Day The Publish'd Shame
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00093
Repository: Library of Congress: Charles N. Elliot Collection
Folder: Nay, Tell Me Not To-Day the Published Shame
Date: ca. 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
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Content: Trial lines and rough draft of the first section of the poem "Nay, Tell Me Not To-Day the Publish'd Shame," first published in the New York Daily Graphic on March 5, 1873. It was not reprinted again during Whitman's lifetime.



Whitman Archive Title: Nay tell me not to-day the publish'd shame
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00222
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Nay Tell Me Not To-Day the Publish'd Shame (Post-1878). Clipping.
Date: about 1878
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14 x 16 cm, printed, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Clipping from the New York Daily Graphic of 5 March 1873, with handwritten corrections.


Nerve.—A Frenchman named

Whitman Archive Title: Nerve.—A Frenchman
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05997
Repository: Library of Congress: Institute of Aerospace Sciences Archives
Date: 1849
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript describes the ascent of a French balloonist from the Brooklyn Military Garden. Whitman leaves out the balloonist's name, but it is likely that he is referring to the ascent of Victor Vardelle on September 19, 1849. A number of announcements of the event had appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the days leading up to the launch, and the launch itself was reported in an unsigned story in the issue of September 20. However, it is highly unlikely that Whitman was the author of that piece; while Whitman had written for the Eagle, his position at the paper was terminated in January 1848, and none of the specific wording from this manuscript appears in the Eagle article. At the time of the September 19 balloon launch, Whitman was apparently between jobs; having announced his resignation from the Brooklyn Freeman on September 11, 1849, he would begin publishing his series "Letters from a Travelling Bachelor" in the New York Sunday Dispatch in October 1849. No published version of this blurb of Whitman's has been located, but it is almost certain that the date of composition was shortly after the balloon launch, in September 1849. On the verso is a note written by antiquarian bookseller, collector, and Whitman bibliographer Alfred Goldsmith (1881–1947).


New Army Organization fit for America, A

Whitman Archive Title: [(result of year in army hospitals]
Whitman Archive ID: bos.00002
Repository: Boston University: The Alice and Rollo G. Silver Collection
Box: 1
Repository Title: I have had one feeling. . .
Date: about 1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Prose draft fragment decrying the lack of democratic sensibilities among commissioned officers. Edward F. Grier transcribes this manuscript under the title "[(Result of Year]" in Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984) 2: 675. Grier suggests that this manuscript is (at least thematically) linked to portions of Democratic Vistas (1871). However, these notes seem to be an early working of ideas that Whitman would later return to and incorporate into his prose. In this manuscript, Whitman mentions the of the role of "true Democracy" in forming a military structure "worthy of America," an idea which he further develops in "A New Army Organization Fit for America," Specimen Days & Collect 1882–1883.



Whitman Archive Title: Memoranda of a Year
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00346
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 143
Date: 1863
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 9 leaves, handwritten, printed
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Content: Draft of letter, heavily revised, to publisher James Redpath. Included with the letter, which pitches Whitman's idea for a book about his firsthand experiences among Civil War soldiers, are a title page mock-up, a draft publisher's announcement, the label that Whitman created for these items, and a blank envelope. The letter is written on the reverse of proofs of a circular for the United States Christian Commission, and the label, which dates the letter to October 21, 1863, is written on the clipped front of a United States Christian Commission envelope. Whitman was unable to get such a book published for over a decade. Memoranda During the War (1875–76) includes the short essay "A New Army Organization Fit for America Needed," which echoes specifically the ideas and language about military reform from the draft letter. This essay was later shortened to a single paragraph and republished in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), given the slightly altered title "A New Army Organization Fit for America." The same language from the letter draft might also have contributed to a note on the topic of military reform that Whitman added to Democratic Vistas (1871) when he created that book-length essay from several earlier pieces.



Whitman Archive Title: Memoranda of a Year
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00095
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 57
Date: between 1863 and 1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On one side of these leaves is a fragmentary set of notes concerning Whitman's belief that the system whereby U.S. military officers are chosen should be reformed to reflect the nation's democratic spirit. This is an idea that Whitman introduced, although briefly, as early as the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, though the present manuscript is most likely related to one or more of Whitman's later, more extended expressions on this topic. The most likely possibility is that these notes represent draft material for the 21 October 1863 letter that Whitman sent to James Redpath, pitching a book idea for his newly established publishing house. On the reverse of the second leaf is a title page mock-up for the proposed book, Memoranda of a Year (1863). Unable to get a publisher for his book at that time, Whitman waited for over a decade to publish Memoranda During the War (1875–76), in which appears a short essay on the topic of military reform, "A New Army Organization Fit for America Needed." Subsequently shortened to a single paragraph when republished in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), it was given the slightly altered title "A New Army Organization Fit for America." The present manuscript may also represent draft material that eventuated in a note on the topic that Whitman added to Democratic Vistas (1871) when he created that book-length essay from several earlier pieces.


New Mexico Religion Catholic

Whitman Archive Title: New Mexico Religion Catholic
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05342
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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."


New Orleans in 1848—Trip Up the Mississippi, etc.

Whitman Archive Title: is rougher than it was
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00786
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS f 129
Date: between 1848 and 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript page containing notes from Whitman's return trip from New Orleans in 1848. This page of notes, numbered "2," describes the journey across Lake Erie; Whitman's visits to Buffalo, Albany, and Niagara Falls; and his arrival at Brooklyn. The notes would later be used as the basis for an article entitled "New Orleans in 1848" that appeared in the New Orleans Picayune on January 25, 1887. The article was reprinted in November Boughs. On the reverse are manuscript notes about Whitman's family history, likely written in the mid-1850s.



Whitman Archive Title: wooding at night
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00790
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 111
Date: between 1848 and 1887
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Manuscript that chronicles part of Whitman's return journey from New Orleans in 1848. The descriptions of the "[l]ong monotonous stretch of the Mississippi" and the "[p]ainful effect of the excessive flatness of the country" found their way, in an altered form, into "New Orleans in 1848," an article that appeared in the New Orleans Picayune on January 25, 1887. The article was later reprinted in November Boughs.



Whitman Archive Title: 1848 New Orleans
Whitman Archive ID: med.00725
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: between 1848 and 1887
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Notes on Whitman's experience in New Orleans in 1848. Whitman used some of these notes in "New Orleans in 1848," first published as "New Orleans in 1848: Walt Whitman Gossips of His Sojourn Here Years Ago as a Newspaper Writer: Notes of His Trip Up the Mississippi and to New York" in the New Orleans Daily Picayune, 25 January 1887. This essay was included in November Boughs (1888), and collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). This manuscript is known only from a transcription published by Emory Holloway in The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (Doubleday, Page & Company, 1921), 77–78.


New Themes Enter'd Upon

Whitman Archive Title: [I have jotted down these memoranda]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00013
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 20
Repository Title: I have written these memoranda
Date: 1876–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A short prose manuscript that reads like notes towards a preface. However, Whitman appears to have returned to this manuscript at a later date, revising some phrases and suggesting that this scrap is the "best foot note of all for first page." In fact, portions of this manuscript were used in Whitman's footnote to "New Themes Entered Upon," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883).



Whitman Archive Title: [I just spin out my notes]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00014
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 22
Repository Title: I just spin out my notes
Date: 1876–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Three scraps of paper, pasted together to make one leaf. Whitman used lines from this manuscript in separate sections of Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). A large portion of this manuscript was revised and appeared under the heading, "Final Confessions—Literary Tests." The line which reads, "I must take notes (The ruling passion strong in sickness and—But I must not say it yet)," appeared slightly revised in the 29 January 1881 issue of The Critic, under the title "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes. (No. 1.)" before appearing in Specimen Days, as part of the section titled "New Themes Entered Upon."



Whitman Archive Title: [Jan 12 1881]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00026
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 44
Repository Title: Wherever I go, or winter or summer
Date: 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Five scraps of paper containing prose notes. One scrap is dated January 12, 1881. On another scrap, "in preface? to my Notes" is written along the top of the page. Together these five scraps of paper comprise a nearly complete draft of "New Themes Entered Upon," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). This piece of prose first appeared in the 29 January 1881 issue of The Critic, under the title "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes. (No. 1)" before it was published in Specimen Days and finally collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). Some lines in this manuscript can also be found in "[I just spin out my notes]," another prose manuscript held in the Livezey collection.


Night Battle over a Week Since, A

Whitman Archive Title: [Who shall tell]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00107
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 62
Repository Title: A Night Battle, Over a Week Since
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1862-1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript is a draft of a piece first published as "May 12—A Night Battle, over a week since" in Memoranda During the War in 1876 and later, as "A Night Battle over a Week Since", in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [And that was war]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00396
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 2-a
Repository Title: "And that was war..."
Repository ID: #3829-ac
Date: 1862-1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a passage about a war night scene of "flitting souls" which would appear, with revisions and additions, with the title of "A Night Battle, Over a Week Since" in Memoranda During the War in 1876 (later retained in Complete Prose Works, published in 1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [the fighting was Saturday night]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00245
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Notes about the Battle of Chancellorsville and fragmentary draft material about the writing of Civil War histories. The draft material contributed to "A Night Battle, over a week since" in Memoranda during the War (1875–76), an essay later reprinted as "A Night Battle, Over a Week Since" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and in Complete Prose Works (1892). The manuscript leaf is pasted to a backing sheet, making the reverse side inaccesssible.


Night on the Prairies

Whitman Archive Title: [Idea of a Poem]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00025
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Date: undated
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Notes, approximately forty words, toward a poem of "celebration of the superiority of the night," perhaps related to the poem eventally titled "Night on the Prairies," first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as No. 15 in the "Leaves of Grass" cluster. This manuscript has been pasted down to a backing sheet and the verso is inaccessible.



Whitman Archive Title: Night on the Prairies
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00203
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Whitman cut off and flipped over the top section of the first leaf, gluing it to the rest of the leaf, in order to transform the original first line into the title. (The current verso of the top section still bears, undeleted, the first line "Night on the prairies[,]" along with the title "Leaf.—" and the number 73, originally 72). Whitman deleted the pencil numbers 16, 17, and 18 in the lower-left corner of the leaves, substituting the numbers 1 through 3. This poem became section 15 of the cluster "Leaves of Grass" in 1860. In 1867 Whitman restored the title "Night on the Prairies" and revised the poem, transferring it to the "Leaves of Grass" group. After other repositionings it achieved its current place in the cluster "Whispers of Heavenly Death" in 1881.


Night Remembrance, A

Whitman Archive Title: [I sit by the edge of the pond]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00070
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 41
Repository Title: A Night Remembrance
Date: 1878–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Various scraps of paper, including an envelope addressed to Whitman from Richard Maurice Bucke, which have been pasted together to create one large leaf. These scraps comprise a nearly complete, though not unrevised, draft of "A Night Remembrance," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). On the verso of this manuscript is what appears to be a scrap of a letter.


Noiseless Patient Spider, A

Whitman Archive Title: Rel ? outset
Whitman Archive ID: med.00776
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: between 1855 and 1868
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: A transcription of this manuscript appeared in Clifton Joseph Furness's Walt Whitman's Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts (Harvard University Press, 1928), 40. Its current location is unknown. The manuscript begins, "First I wish you to realize well that our boasted knowledege, precious and manifold as it is, sinks into niches and corners, before the infinite knowledge of the unknown," a statement reminiscent of the following line from "Poem of the Road" (1856): "All religion, all solid things, arts, governments—all that was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners before the processions of souls along the grand roads of the universe." This poem was eventually retitled "Song of the Open Road." The last part of the manuscript describes, as a metaphor for human attempts to articulate "the spiritual world," a worm "on a twig reaching out in the immense vacancy time and again, trying point after point." This image is one Whitman developed in the poem "A Noiseless Patient Spider," first published in the October 1868 issue of The Broadway, A London Magazine as the third of four numbered poems grouped under the title "Whispers of Heavenly Death."



Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman. 1862.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00026
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


Nor humility's book

Whitman Archive Title: [nor humility's book]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00505
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: General Correspondence
Box: 9
Folder: Doyle, Peter. Oct. 14, 1868.
Date: 1868
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A draft of a poem on the verso of an 1868 draft letter to Peter Doyle. The poem has been published posthumously under the title "[Nor Humility's Book]."


Not Heat Flames up and Consumes

Whitman Archive Title: Calamus-Leaves
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00310
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 9 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On white wove leaf, 15 x 9 cm, in black ink, with the title "Live Oak, with Moss" stricken out and "Calamus-Leaves" added in light brown ink, and with one small revision in blue pencil. Whitman numbered this page 1 in pencil. The first section of the original sequence "Live Oak, with Moss," this became section 14 of "Calamus" in 1860 and was permanently retitled "Not Heat Flames up and Consumes" in the 1867 Leaves.


Not Meagre, Latent Boughs Alone

Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00326
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of a collection of four poems ("You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone") under the general title "November Boughs." This proof is made by pasting together proofs of each poem in the order desired.



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02484
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proofs of a collection of four poems ("You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone") under the general title "November Boughs."



Whitman Archive Title: [Not meagre latent boughs alone]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00224
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Not Meagre, Latent Boughs Alone (1887)
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 10 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial lines for "Not Meagre, Latent Boughs Alone," first published in 1887. Written at top is "Camden" and the date, April 28, 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04206
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Printed Copy.
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Clipping from a newspaper of four Whitman poems: "You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone." At the top is the title "November Boughs." At the bottom of the clipping is written, in Whitman's hand, "1887." The poems were published first in Lippincott's Magazine, November, 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: [Not Meagre, Latent Boughs Alone]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00223
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Not Meagre, Latent Boughs Alone (1887)
Date: May 2, 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A late draft of "Not Meagre, Latent Boughs Alone" first published in 1887, with Whitman's signature at the bottom and "Camden NJ" and the date, May 2, 1887, written at the top.


Note at Beginning

Whitman Archive Title: Note at Beginning
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02147
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Oversize
Box: OV1
Folder: container 19
Date: 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript of "Note at Beginning," which appeared between the title page and the table of contents of Whitman's Complete Poems & Prose in 1888. On the other side of the sheet is a deleted manuscript section from the same volume's "Note at End of Complete Poems and Prose." Neither of the pieces was reprinted during Whitman's lifetime.


Note at End of Complete Poems and Prose

Whitman Archive Title: In forming the book
Whitman Archive ID: amh.00014
Repository: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Date: undated; between 1873 and 1889
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one side of the leaf is a heavily revised prose fragment in which Whitman claims that his literary project has been to craft poetry which, rather than exemplifying conventional notions of poetic form, offers a faithful record of the writer's life and milieu. The relationship of this draft to any one of Whitman's published works is uncertain, though it resembles passages in several, including "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" (1888) and "Note at End of Complete Poems and Prose" (1888). The other side of the leaf contains the last page of a letter to Whitman from James Matlack Scovel.



Whitman Archive Title: Note at Beginning
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02147
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Oversize
Box: OV1
Folder: container 19
Date: 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript of "Note at Beginning," which appeared between the title page and the table of contents of Whitman's Complete Poems & Prose in 1888. On the other side of the sheet is a deleted manuscript section from the same volume's "Note at End of Complete Poems and Prose." Neither of the pieces was reprinted during Whitman's lifetime.



Whitman Archive Title: To Printer
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02147
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Oversize
Box: OV1
Folder: container 19
Date: 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript of "Note at end of Complete Poems and Prose," published in Complete Poems & Prose (1888) and not reprinted during Whitman's lifetime.



Whitman Archive Title: [Seems to me I may dare to claim a deep native]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00206
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 3
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Partial draft of "Note at End of Complete Poems and Prose," which was published in Complete Poems & Prose (1888) and not reprinted during Whitman's lifetime. No image of the manuscript's verso is available.


November 8, '76

Whitman Archive Title: [Down at the creek]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00042
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 58
Repository Title: Down at the Creek
Date: 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A prose draft, dated November 8, 1876 and headed "Down at the Creek." Portions of this manuscript appeared under the title "November 8, '76" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). "November 8, '76" was later collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


November Boughs

Whitman Archive Title: This first page will be
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00030
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: OV 4
Folder: November Boughs, Galley Proofs
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 62 leaves, printed, 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
Content: Sixty-two pages of galley proofs of November Boughs (1888), with numerous corrections.



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00031
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: OV 4
Folder: November Boughs, Galley Proofs
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 14 leaves, handwritten, printed
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
Content: Galley proofs of November Boughs (1888), with numerous corrections. Also included is a title page, with printing instructions in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00032
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: OV 4
Folder: November Boughs, Galley Proofs
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 21 leaves, handwritten, printed
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
Content: Galley proofs of November Boughs (1888), with numerous corrections. Also included is an uncorrected title page, which seems to incorporate the changes Whitman requested on the title page in another set of corrected proofs for November Boughs; compare the title page for this set of proofs with the first image of loc.00031.



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00033
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: OV 4
Folder: November Boughs, Galley Proofs
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Galley proofs of November Boughs (1888), with Whitman's corrections.



Whitman Archive Title: [I suppose one can say]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00084
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 10
Repository Title: The Bible as Poetry
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1880-1883
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is an early draft of the first part of the essay "The Bible as Poetry" published in the Critic on February 3, 1883 and then included, with the same title, in November Boughs, published in 1888 (later retained in the Complete Prose Works, published in 1892). On the verso is a letter from D.W. Zimmerman to Whitman, dated 13 January 1883.



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00326
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of a collection of four poems ("You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone") under the general title "November Boughs." This proof is made by pasting together proofs of each poem in the order desired.



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02484
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proofs of a collection of four poems ("You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone") under the general title "November Boughs."



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04206
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Printed Copy.
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Clipping from a newspaper of four Whitman poems: "You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone." At the top is the title "November Boughs." At the bottom of the clipping is written, in Whitman's hand, "1887." The poems were published first in Lippincott's Magazine, November, 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman's Book
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00344
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 41
Folder: Miscellany, Undated, Walt Whitman's books
Date: 1888
Genre: prose, prose
Physical Description: leaves, handwritten, printed
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
Content: A collection of papers, some of which are print proofs with handwritten comments, some of which are small scraps of handwriting, relating to both poetry and prose from November Boughs (1888).


Now Finalè to the Shore [poem]

Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 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
Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


Now Precedent Songs, Farewell

Whitman Archive Title: The two songs on this page are
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00014
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 14
Date: June 19, 1888
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains the footnote for poems "Now Precedent Songs, Farewell" and "An Evening Lull," first published in "Sands at Seventy," an annex of November Boughs in 1888. According to Horace Traubel, the footnote was written by Whitman on 19 June 1888 (With Walt Whitman in Camden [Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906] 1:353).



Whitman Archive Title: Now precedent songs, Farewell
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00092
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Now Precedent Songs, Farewell
Date: 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A draft of the poem "Now Precedent Songs, Farewell," which first appeared in November Boughs (1888) and was reprinted in the 1891–92 printing of Leaves of Grass.


[number of the Crusades is, The]

Whitman Archive Title: [The number of the Crusades is]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00071
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


N.W. Texas, Utah, New Mexico

Whitman Archive Title: N.W. Texas, Utah, New Mexico
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05339
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


O Captain, My Captain

Whitman Archive Title: My Captain
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00125
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: O Captain! My Captain! (1865). A.MS.drafts.
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Draft of the poem that would be published as "O Captain! My Captain!" in 1865, titled here "My Captain." On the verso of one page is a portion of "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown" with a line through it.



Whitman Archive Title: O Captain! my Captain!
Whitman Archive ID: brn.00001
Repository: Brown University: John Hay Papers
Repository Title: Whitman, Walt to Hay, John
Date: March 9, 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A signed, dated, handwritten copy of "O Captain! My Captain!," which was published first in 1865. The manuscript was recopied by Whitman, without changes from the version published in 1881, at the request of John Hay, who wrote Whitman in 1887 to request an autograph copy of the poem. The manuscript is stored with a cover letter from Whitman to Hay, which requests payment of $22. A letter from Hay to Whitman dated March 12, 1887 , acknowledges receipt of the manuscript and sends a check for thirty dollars in payment. An image of the manuscript's verso is currently unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: o the bleeding drops of red
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00091
Repository: Library of Congress: Walt Whitman Collection
Date: 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Handwritten notes and corrections on a printed copy of the poem "O Captain! My Captain!" Although the poem was first published in the Saturday Press on November 4, 1865 and later included in Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865-66), the corrections on this particular copy were made in early 1888, when the poem was reprinted in the Riverside Literature Series, Number 32 (January 1888). On the verso is a note from Whitman to the publishers of the Riverside Literature Series concerning corrections to be made to their printed version of the poem.



Whitman Archive Title: O Captain! My Captain!
Whitman Archive ID: ihm.00002
Repository: Iowa Historical Museum (Des Moines)
Date: 1889-1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript copy of "O Captain! My Captain!," with a brief handwritten note at the bottom. On June 12, 1890 Whitman sent this copy, along with a letter, to Charles Aldrich, a former Iowa State Representative and the founder of the Iowa State Historical Department. "O Captain! My Captain!" was originally published in the Saturday Press on November 4, 1865 before ultimately being moved to the "Memories of President Lincoln" cluster of Leaves of Grass (1881-82). For a detailed description of Whitman's connection to Aldrich, see Ed Folsom, "Walt Whitman at Iowa," Books at Iowa 39 (November 1983), 17-37.



Whitman Archive Title: O Captain! My Captain!
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00002
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository ID: MA 1212
Date: 27 April 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: "O Captain! My Captain!" was written in response to the death of Abraham Lincoln and first published on November 4, 1865 in the New-York Saturday Press . It would later be reprinted in Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865) and then again, with slight revisions, in Passage to India (1871) and Leaves of Grass (1881-82). This particular manuscript was written out by Whitman for Dr. S. Weir Mitchell (a prominent author and doctor) at the request of Horace Howard Furness, for the amount of one-hundred dollars. A note on the back of the manuscript in Mitchell's hand says, "To give Walt a little money I offered for a gentleman 100$ for an autograph copy of My Captain—I pin it to Furness note April 1890." This manuscript differs slightly from the first printing, but agrees with that in Leaves of Grass, 1881-82, with one exception: In the penultimate line, Whitman has probably mistakenly written "dead" instead of "deck."



Whitman Archive Title: O Captain! My Captain!
Whitman Archive ID: jhu.00001
Repository: The Johns Hopkins University: Special Collections, The Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Sheridan Libraries
Repository ID: MS. 7
Date: April 30, 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A handwritten version of "O Captain! My Captain!" presumably re-penned by request and presented to well-known doctor and author S. Weir Mitchell by Whitman on April 30, 1890. The poem was, in turn, given to Daniel Coit Gilman in 1894; the Johns Hopkins University library holds the correspondence between Gilman and Mitchell discussing this exchange.


O Living Always, Always Dying

Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [O dying! Always dying!]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00319
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21.5 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one light blue Williamsburgh tax blank (21.5 x 12 cm), in dark brown ink, with revisions in fine pen and pencil. Whitman penciled in a question mark, in parentheses, next to the title. With the addition of the new first line "O love!" this became section 27 of "Calamus" in 1860. In the 1867 Leaves it was retitled "O Living Always—Always Dying!" Whitman next transferred it to the "Passage to India" supplement bound in with Leaves, where it reappeared in 1876; in the 1881 Leaves Whitman permanently added it to the cluster "Whispers of Heavenly Death."



Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


O Magnet-South

Whitman Archive Title: Longings for Home
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00001
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Longings for home
Repository ID: HM 11200
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: Lightly revised draft of a poem first published as "Longings For Home" in Southern Literary Messenger (July 1860) and Leaves of Grass (1860–61). It was reprinted in Leaves of Grass (1871–72). In later editions it appeared under the title "O Magnet-South," with minor revisions.


O Star of France (1870–71)

Whitman Archive Title: O Star of France
Whitman Archive ID: brl.00001
Repository: The British Library
Repository ID: Add 39168 (I.10)
Date: 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Full draft, heavily revised, of "O Star of France," which was first published in the June 1872 issue of The Galaxy. It was subsequently reprinted in As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free (1872) and Two Rivulets (1876). A revised version appeared in Leaves of Grass (1881–82) and in Leaves of Grass (1891–92). The poem's title is repeated on the verso of the final leaf. Images of the other versos are forthcoming.



Whitman Archive Title: O Star of France
Whitman Archive ID: mcf.00001
Repository: Musée de la Coopération Franco-Américaine
Date: ca. 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Draft of "O Star of France," first published in the Galaxy in June 1871. Images of the versos are unavailable.


O You whom I Often and Silently Come

Whitman Archive Title: [O you whom I often and silently come where you are]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00324
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14.5 x 9 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper (14.5 x 9 cm), in brown-black ink, with revisions in the same ink. Pinholes mostly at the top, with a few lower down. The tenth section of the original sequence "Live Oak, with Moss" (with ornamental Roman numeral), this was reformatted and renumbered but otherwise left unrevised as section 43 of "Calamus" in 1860. In 1867 Whitman permanently retitled it "O You Whom I Often and Silently Come."


Oaks and I, The

Whitman Archive Title: [Feb 10—Warmish to-day]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00054
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 68
Repository Title: Warmish today
Date: 1877
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Notes detailing a portion of Whitman's restorative time in the rural area near Timber Creek. These notes first appeared in the 9 April 1881 issue of The Critic as part of "How I Get Around at Sixty and Take Notes. (No. 2)," under the section heading "Convalescent Hours." Whitman further revised these notes before publishing them as a portion of "The Oaks and I," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). "The Oaks and I" was later published in Complete Prose Works (1892). Though Whitman dated these manuscript notes 10 February 1877, he seems to have been unsure about the precise date of this piece. Published versions of this prose item appeared with a date of 5 September 1877.



Whitman Archive Title: Sept. 5 '77
Whitman Archive ID: tul.00005
Repository: University of Tulsa: Walt Whitman Ephemera
Repository Title: [Convalescence.]
Date: 1877
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A partial draft of a prose piece, with the cancelled title "Convalescence." A revised version of this draft fragment was first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) as "The Oaks and I." Whitman included "The Oaks and I" unchanged in Complete Prose (1892).


Of all themes and of

Whitman Archive Title: [Of All themes and of each]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00081
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 63
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: about 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19.5 cm x 8.5 cm and 5.5 cm x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The manuscript contains heavily revised draft lines written in pencil beginning "Of all themes and of each." The relationship between the draft lines and Whitman's published verse is unknown.


of Death

Whitman Archive Title: of Death—the song
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00292
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: 1845–1892
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Idea for a poem about death, immortality, and "ensemble." It is unclear whether and how this manuscript is related to Whitman's published poetry. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Poem L'Envoy," "Banjo Poem," and "Poem [?The Cruise]."


Of Him I Love Day and Night

Whitman Archive Title: Poemet
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00325
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two pink leaves (21 x 13 cm), in black ink, with revisions in the same ink and in light ink. Pinholes in center, at top, and in top-left corner. This poem was originally titled "Leaf" and apparently numbered 78; Whitman inscribed its new title, "Poemet," in light ink. It became number 17 of the "Calamus" cluster in 1860, with the lines on the first leaf corresponding to verses 1-7 and those on the second ("And what I dreamed I will/ henceforth tell...") to verses 8-13 of the first published version. Retitled "Of Him I Love Day and Night" in 1867, it was transferred to the "Whispers of Heavenly Death" cluster in Passage to India in 1871. In 1881 Whitman incorporated it, with the rest of the cluster, in the main body of Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


of my adherence

Whitman Archive Title: Poem for the good old cause
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00002
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 56
Date: Between 1850 and 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript includes ideas for two poems, one of which is titled "Poem for the good old cause." It is possible that this is a very early draft of the poem "To Thee Old Cause," which first appeared in the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass. However, Whitman used the term "good old cause" as early as the 1855 edition, where it appears in the Preface. In the 1860–1861 edition the phrase also appears in the poem "To a Cantatrice" (eventually titled "To a Certain Cantatrice." It originated in England during the seventeenth century, shortly after the English Civil War, and was frequently used by Whitman (see Clarence Gohdes, "Whitman and the 'Good Old Cause,'" American Literature 34.3 [November 1962]: 400–403). Edward Grier notes that this manuscript likely was written prior to 1860 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1329). The titles of both of the proposed poems ("Poem of...") suggest the title format of the 1856 edition. It is unclear whether the second proposed poem, titled Poem of the People, ever led to a published work.


Of That Blithe Throat of Thine

Whitman Archive Title: Of that blithe throat of thine
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00226
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Of That Blithe Throat of Thine (1884). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 x 22 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Signed, late draft of "Of That Blithe Throat of Thine" which was published first in January, 1885. On the verso is a letter from Folger McKinney to Whitman dated June 10, 1884.



Whitman Archive Title: [Souls of the dying float out with you]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04164
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Of That Blithe Throat of Thine
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02372
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Of That Blithe Throat of Thine (1884). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1884-1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This proof is grouped with other copies of proof sheets that represent different stages of the printing. "Of That Blithe Throat of Thine" was published first in January, 1885.



Whitman Archive Title: Of That Blithe Throat of Thine
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02371
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Of That Blithe Throat of Thine (1884). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1884-1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This proof is grouped with other copies of proof sheets that represent different stages of the printing. "Of That Blithe Throat of Thine" was published first in January, 1885.



Whitman Archive Title: Of That Blithe Throat of Thine
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02370
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Of That Blithe Throat of Thine (1884). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1884-1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This proof is grouped with other copies of proof sheets that represent different stages of the printing. "Of That Blithe Throat of Thine" was published first in January, 1885.



Whitman Archive Title: Of That Blithe Throat of Thine
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02369
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Of That Blithe Throat of Thine (1884). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1884-1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This proof is grouped with other copies of proof sheets that represent different stages of the printing. Whitman has also written instructions to the printer on this proof sheet. "Of That Blithe Throat of Thine" was published first in January, 1885.



Whitman Archive Title: Of That Blithe Throat of Thine
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00227
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: Of That Blithe Throat of Thine (1884). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1884-1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This proof is grouped with other copies of proof sheets that represent different stages of the printing. "Of That Blithe Throat of Thine" was published first in January, 1885.


Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

Whitman Archive Title: [Of the doubts]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00322
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21.5 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two light blue Williamsburgh tax blanks (21.5 x 12 cm), in light brown ink, with minor revisions. A few pinholes at the head and in the center. A blue pencil question mark appears to the left of the first line on the second form. The lines on the first leaf became verses 1-9 of section 7 of "Calamus" in 1860, and the second leaf's lines ("To me all these, and the/ like of these,..."] became verses 10-16. Retitled "Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances" in 1867.


of these poems

Whitman Archive Title: of these poems
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04600
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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."


Of your soul I say

Whitman Archive Title: [Of your soul I say truths to harmonize]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00282
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 7.5 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The verso contains the words "Leaves of" from a title page of the 1855 edition of "Leaves of Grass". The damage to the words "The gripe" in the last line by cutting and the appearance of the tops of other letters above the lower edge suggest that this was the upper section of a larger leaf.


Old Actors, Singers, Shows, etc., in New York

Whitman Archive Title: Two or three memories
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05304
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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."


Old Age's Lambent Peaks

Whitman Archive Title: Sands at Seventy
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00174
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 22
Folder: L of G (1888). Page Proofs—Sands at Seventy
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 20 leaves, 28.5 x 19.7 cm, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21
Content: Proof of Sands at Seventy with some notes in Whitman's hand and in another, unidentified hand. The notes mostly regard pagination and the insertion of the poem "Old Age's Lambent Peaks."



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age's Lambent Peaks
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00164
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 66
Date: 1880s
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25 cm x 20.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a draft of a poem first printed in the Century, September, 1888 entitled "Old Age's Lambent Peaks". A note in the top margin states: "sent to Century accepted—paid" indicating the draft was likely completed around the time of publication. Thee poem was collected into reprints of Leaves of Grass in the Annex of the 1884-88 editions and in the Birthday edition of 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age's Lambent Peaks
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00233
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age's Lambent Peaks (1888). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 33 x 15 cm; envelope 10.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An edited proof sheet with three poems: "Old Age's Lambent Peaks," "A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine," "To Get the Final Lilt of Songs," all published first in 1888. In addition to corrections, Whitman has written a note to the printer at the top of the page. Also included is an envelope with "printer's proofs, short poems, Walt Whitman, 1888, (autographic)" written on it.


Old Age's Ship & Crafty Death's

Whitman Archive Title: Old Age's Ship & Crafty Death's
Whitman Archive ID: bos.00001
Repository: Boston University: The Alice and Rollo G. Silver Collection
Box: 1
Repository Title: Old Age's Ship & Crafty Death's
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a proof of "Old Age's Ship & Crafty Death's," first published in Century Magazine February 1890, with corrections and annotations in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: [Put on the old ship]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00234
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's (1890). A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1888-1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 25.5 x 22.5, 24 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: An early draft written in ink, with a correction in blue pencil, of "Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's," first published in 1890. The draft has the underlined title "Old Age's Ship and crafty Death" half way down the page. One page is written on the back an opened envelope addressed to Whitman and postmarked Scarborough, December 20, 1888.



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00235
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's (1890). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1890-1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Corrected proof of "Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's" with notations in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00236
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's (1890). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1890 and 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Corrected proof of "Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's" with notations in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02391
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's (1890). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1890-1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Corrected proof of "Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's" with notations in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02392
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's (1890). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1890-1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Corrected proof of "Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's" with notations in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02393
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's (1890). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1890-1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Corrected proof of "Old Age's Ship and Crafty Death's" with notations in Whitman's hand.


Old Bowery, The

Whitman Archive Title: Two or three memories
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05304
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: See page 81
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05320
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


Old Brooklyn Landmark Going, An

Whitman Archive Title: Notebook Walt Whitman
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05080
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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


Old Chants

Whitman Archive Title: The Nibelungen
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00188
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID:
Date: 1855-1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The term "Nibelungen" appears in a poem first published in the New York Truth, March 19, 1891 entitled "Old Chants." The poem is one of the thiry-one poems included in "Second Annex--Good-Bye My Fancy," 1891–1892.



Whitman Archive Title: America to the Old World Bards
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04599
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Old Chants
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04598
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: An Old Man's Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00230
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 36.5 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proofs of four poems pasted together and collected under the main handwritten title "An Old Man's Recitatives." The poems included are: "Ancient songs reciting" (published as "Old Chants" in 1891), "Grand is the seen" (first published in 1891), "Death dogs my steps" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), and "For us two, reader dear," first published in 1891. A note in Whitman's hand in the right margin details failed attempts to publish this grouping in Scribner's.



Whitman Archive Title: Old-Age Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00232
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 28 x 21 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Proof pages of six poems collected under the general title "Old-Age Recitatives." The poems included are: "Old Chants" (1891), "On, On the Same,Ye Jocund Twain!" (1891), "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!" (1891), "L. of G.'s Purport" (only two lines of the twelve-line poem of the same title first published in 1891), "My task" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), and "For us two, reader dear" (1891). At the top of the first page is a note to the printer in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: Old Chants
Whitman Archive ID: tem.00002
Repository: Temple University: Rare Books and Manuscripts, Special Collections
Repository Title: Old Chants
Repository ID: Mss. 2517
Date: ca. 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 36.3 x 21.4 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of "Old Chants," made of fragments pasted together, with corrections in Whitman's hand. Also included on the page is a note by Horace Traubel reading "Given by Walt Whitman to me and then by me to Will Innes, 1905." On verso: "Henry Curtis printer, Cor: Bridge Ave. & 2d, Camden." "Old Chants" first appeared in Truth (19 March 1891), and was reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891).



Whitman Archive Title: America to Old-World Bards
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00047
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: America to Old World Bards (1891). A.MS. drafts.
Date: 1890 or 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Content: Written in ink on the inside of four discarded envelopes, one letter, and a sheet made by pasting together the insides of three discarded envelopes (all sent to Whitman in September and October 1890), entitled "America to Old-World Bards: A reminiscence from reading Walter Scott," published as "Old Chants" in 1891.


Old Man's Rejoinder, An

Whitman Archive Title: [*current aims]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04536
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, Undated, Cosmic Poem
Date: about 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Three manuscript fragments that contributed to "An Old Man's Rejoinder," which was first published in the August 16, 1890 issue of the Critic and later reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) and Complete Prose Works (1892). On the reverse of the second manuscript leaf is the end of a letter from Otto L. Levy.



Whitman Archive Title: [Somewhere I have found Carlyle announcing]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04413
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: about 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript notes, heavily revised, apparently for the preface to Whitman's 1891 volume Good-Bye My Fancy, although the printed preface (titled "Preface Note to 2d Annex, Concluding L. of G.—1891") incorporates very few of the actual words and phrases from this manuscript. The preface was later reprinted, without change, in the 1891-92 printing of Leaves of Grass. On the reverse is a letter from Louisa Drewry, dated July 10, 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: An old man's rejoinder
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00318
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 112
Date: 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 9 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19
Content: This manuscript is a draft of "An Old Man's Rejoinder," first published in the Critic 17 (16 August 1890) before being reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891). Some of the versos include envelopes and letters to Whitman from A. Edward Newton, Charles A. Burkhardt, Charles B. Campbell.


Old Man's Thought of School, The

Whitman Archive Title: [An old man's thought of school]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00237
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: An Old Man's Thought of School (1874). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 44.5 x 20.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Two composite leaves made from pasting together several scraps of paper containing a draft of "An Old Man's Thought of School," a poem Whitman recited in person at the inauguration of the Cooper Public School in Camden, New Jersey, in 1874. On the versos are parts of letters (to Whitman) and notes in Whitman's hand.


Old Poets

Whitman Archive Title: American Poets
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00057
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository Title: American poets: autograph manuscript
Repository ID: MA 518.2
Date: 1850–1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: , handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A partial draft of "Old Poets," first published in North American Review (November 1890). It was reprinted under the title, "Old Poets and the New Poetry" in Pall Mall Gazette (17 November 1890), before it appeared in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) and again in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Old Poets
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00053
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Old Poets: [essay]
Repository ID: HM 50563
Date: 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A draft of Whitman's essay "Old Poets," with handwritten printer's instructions at the top of the first leaf. The essay was first printed in the North American Review in November 1890 and later reprinted in the Pall Mall Gazette (17 November 1890) and in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891).



Whitman Archive Title: [Make a piece]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03408
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Judgments of People
Date: about 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes about historical examples of extreme reactions against seemingly unobjectionable works and practices. Whitman used these ideas in "Old Poets," which was first published in 1888 in November Boughs and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Old Salt Kossabone

Whitman Archive Title: Old Salt Kossabone
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00068
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Salt Kossabone (1880). A.MS. draft.
Date: late 1887 or early 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Late draft of "Old Salt Kossabone," first published in the New York Herald on February 25, 1888. There is a note on the reverse of the manuscript in another hand (Ellen Terry).


Old War-Dreams

Whitman Archive Title: Old War-Dreams
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00238
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old War-Dreams (1865-66). Proof.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "Old War-Dreams" with note at bottom in Whitman's hand: "Walt Whitman's New Book." This poem was published first, in a different form, as "In Clouds Descending, in Midnight Sleep" in 1865-1866. In 1871 it appeared under the title "In Midnight Sleep." The title "Old War-Dreams" was first applied in 1881.


On Journeys through The States

Whitman Archive Title: Wander-Teachers
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00198
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: The poem was originally numbered 50. Whitman penciled in a question mark, in parentheses, in the upper-right corner. This became section 17 of "Chants Democratic" in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, with leaf 1 corresponding to verses 1-6 and leaf 2 ("We confer on equal terms with / each of The States,") to verses 7-13. Although he dropped it from Leaves of Grass in 1867, Whitman nonetheless used the poem, permanently retitled "On Journeys through the States," in Passage to India in 1871. In 1872 and 1876 it appeared in the "Passage to India" annexes to Leaves of Grass and Two Rivulets, respectively, and in the 1881 edition it took its final position in the cluster "Inscriptions."


On, on the Same, ye Jocund Twain

Whitman Archive Title: On, on the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00080
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: bv2
Repository Title: On, on the Same, ye Jocund Twain, Proof with handwritten corrections
Date:
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1
Content: Heavily revised proof sheet of "On, on the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!" The poem first appeared in Good-Bye My Fancy in 1891. This proof has been pasted to another sheet and no verso image is available.



Whitman Archive Title: Old-Age Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00232
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 28 x 21 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Proof pages of six poems collected under the general title "Old-Age Recitatives." The poems included are: "Old Chants" (1891), "On, On the Same,Ye Jocund Twain!" (1891), "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!" (1891), "L. of G.'s Purport" (only two lines of the twelve-line poem of the same title first published in 1891), "My task" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), and "For us two, reader dear" (1891). At the top of the first page is a note to the printer in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: On, On the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00240
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: On, On the Same, Ye Jocund Twain! (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, 24 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Three proof sheets of "On, On the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!," first published in 1891. One proof has several corrections and a note for the printer; the other two proofs have no annotations.



Whitman Archive Title: On, on the same, ye jocund twain!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00239
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: On, On the Same, Ye Jocund Twain! (1891). A.MS. drafts.
Date: May 10, 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 x 22 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A late draft of "On, on the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!," which was published first in 1891. This draft is signed and dated May 10, 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: Go forth, ye twain
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00069
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: On, On the Same, Ye Jocund Twain! (1891). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: An early draft of "On, on the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!," which was published first in 1891. The draft is written on a letter from Albert Johannsen (dated March 22, 1890), and two opened envelopes (one postmarked April 27, 1890).



Whitman Archive Title: Go forth, ye twain
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00072
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: On, On the Same, Ye Jocund Twain! (1891). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of "On, on the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!," which was published first in 1891. On the verso is a note in Whitman's hand reading "to my 2d & last Annex for L of G."



Whitman Archive Title: On, on awhile ye jocund twain
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00074
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: On, On the Same, Ye Jocund Twain! (1891). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of "On, on the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!," which was published first in 1891.



Whitman Archive Title: On, on the same, ye jocund twain!
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00071
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: bv2
Repository Title: On, on the Same, ye Jocund Twain, Manuscript
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily revised draft, approximately fourteen lines, of "On, on the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!," a poem first published in Good-Bye My Fancy in 1891.


On the Beach at Night

Whitman Archive Title: [(illeg.) Dick Hunt]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00028
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: 1857 Trial Lines and Descriptions
Date: 1856-1857
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 90 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
Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 246–280, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "To a Common Prostitute," "You Felons on Trial in Courts," "Starting from Paumanok," "Trickle Drops," "I Was Looking for a Long While," "Poem of Joys," "Facing West from California's Shores," "To the States," "A Song of the Rolling Earth," "On the Beach a Night Alone," "Full of Life Now," and "With Antecedents."


on the other side

Whitman Archive Title: [I have had serious doubts]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00094
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Date: about 1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Partial draft, heavily revised, of what appears to have been intended as a preface to a late edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript leaf has been pasted to a backing sheet, and the verso is inaccessible.


on the other side is

Whitman Archive Title: On the other side
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00241
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 206
Date: 1855-1858
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A partial draft of what appears to be a self-review of Leaves of Grass. Whitman published numerous anonymous self-reviews throughout his life, and this scrap contains language similar to several extant reviews, in which Whitman references his own "barbaric yawp" and makes a clear distinction between that which is new and powerful (represented by his own poetry) from that which is old and stilted (previous poetic traditions). The time and location of publication is unknown, but Edward Grier notes that the Collins steamship line, which Whitman references, ceased operating in 1858, suggesting that this is likely a review for the 1855 or 1856 edition of Leaves (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984] 1:336).


Once I Pass'd through a Populous City

Whitman Archive Title: [Once I passed through a populous]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00183
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The recto verses appearing on this manuscript became the main section 9 of "Enfans d'Adam" in 1860 and were retitled "Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City" in 1867. On the verso appear two fragments: an undeleted verse that would be used in Satan's section of "Chanting the Square Deific" in "Sequel to Drum-Taps" (1865-66); and what would become section 23 of "Proto-Leaf", which becomes "Starting from Paumanok" in 1867. The undeleted verse is upside-down relative to the deleted section.


One of the Lessons Bordering Broadway: The Egyptian Museum

Whitman Archive Title: identical with the
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00878
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Prose notes that relate to "I Sing the Body Electric," first published as the fifth poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The first line of the manuscript may relate to information Whitman used to write the article "One of the Lessons Bordering Broadway: The Egyptian Museum," published in Life Illustrated on December 8, 1855. This manuscript is pasted to a larger document along with another scrap that includes information used in that article. Both manuscript scraps were probably written shortly before or early in 1855, though the notes on the backing sheet to which they have been pasted may have been written at a later date. The reverse side of the leaf is part of a manuscript (duk.00066) discussing the conception of time.



Whitman Archive Title: Give us men
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00877
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is an adaptation of notes Whitman took about Egypt, almost certainly based on his reading of Sir John Gardner Wilkinson's Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1837). Related information about Sesostris appears on page 29 of the first volume in Wilkinson's collection, though Whitman may have been reading a different edition. Whitman used the information in his article "One of the Lessons Bordering Broadway: The Egyptian Museum," published in Life Illustrated on December 8, 1855. Similar descriptions of Sesostris appear in several of Whitman's other notes and manuscripts, including "Immortality was realized" (mid.00018) and "Abraham's visit to Egypt" (tex.00200) two sets of manuscript notes about Egypt that Edward Grier dates to between 1855 and 1860 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 5:1922; 6:2022); the notebook "women" (loc.05589); and the poetic rendition "Advance shapes like his shape" (tex.00028). The manuscript is pasted to a larger document along with another scrap, the reverse of which (duk.00878) features prose notes that relate to what became section 2 of "I Sing the Body Electric," first published as the fifth poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Both manuscripts were probably written shortly before or early in 1855, though the notes on the backing sheet to which they have been pasted may have been written at a later date.



Whitman Archive Title: Chronological
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00066
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Date: Between 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, with 2 pasted-on attachments, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript consists of a backing sheet with two smaller manuscript scraps pasted on, which together, at one time, likely formed part of Whitman's cultural geography scrapbook. The pasted-on manuscript scraps were originally part of the notebook "women" (loc.05589), which probably dates from about 1854 to about 1860. Prose notes written on the back of the bottom paste-on (duk.00878) relate to what became section 2 of "I Sing the Body Electric," first published as the fifth poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Both manuscript scraps were probably written shortly before or early in 1855, though the notes on the backing sheet to which they have been pasted may have been written at a later date.



Whitman Archive Title: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 7
Folder: Photocopies Notebooks [before 1855]
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 31 leaves, handwritten
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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.


One Wicked Impulse

Whitman Archive Title: a schoolmaster
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04588
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks c. 1852?
Date: Before or early in 1852
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 11 leaves, handwritten, print
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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.


One's-Self I Sing

Whitman Archive Title: Inscription
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00060
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 46
Repository ID: #3829
Date: between 1855 and 1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript entitled "Inscription" appears to be a revision of other "Inscriptions" Whitman gathered in a notebook, along with prose drafts for a never-finished introduction to Leaves of Grass, and attached to his copy of the 1855 paper-bound edition. (The entire collection of draft "inscription" and introductory material is currently housed at the New York Public Library.) In the 1867 Leaves of Grass Whitman culled material from this poem and the other "Inscription" poems to create an italicized "Inscription" that he placed before "Starting from Paumanok" at the beginning of the book; in that edition he also transferred part of verse 2 to "As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario's Shore" (later the line was dropped and the title was revised to "By Blue Ontario's Shore"). From 1872 onward, this poem, revised and retitled "One's-Self I Sing," was printed as the first of several poems in the "Inscriptions" cluster that opened the book. In the 1888 November Boughs, however, Whitman reprinted the 1867 version as "Small the Theme of my Chant." Note: This manuscript draft may have been written before the Civil War, since it does not include the 1867 line "My Days I sing, and the Lands—with interstice I knew / of hapless War."



Whitman Archive Title: Inscription To the Reader at the entrance of Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00520
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1860–1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten
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Content: One of a series of draft introductions Whitman prepared for Leaves of Grass, but which were never printed during his lifetime. This particular introduction, composed entirely in verse, was reworked and revised multiple times. Though "Inscription To the Reader at the entrance of Leaves of Grass" did not appear in print as a distinct and cohesive piece until collected by Clifton Joseph Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop (1928), portions of this draft were distilled into "One's-self I Sing," first published as "Inscription" in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman revised this poem before including it as "One's-self I Sing" in 1871, dropping some of the lines only to reintroduce them in "Sands at Seventy" (1888), under the title "Small the Theme of My Chant." Both "One's-self I Sing" and "Small the Theme of My Chant" appeared in the 1891-92 edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines from this manuscript were also revised and used in the poem "So Long!," which first appeared in the 1860-61 edition of Leaves of Grass. The verso of the last leaf is blank and an image is unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Inscription at the entrance of Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00517
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1860–1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3
Content: One of a series of draft introductions Whitman prepared for Leaves of Grass, but which were never printed during Whitman's lifetime. This particular introduction, composed entirely in verse, was reworked and revised multiple times. Though "Inscription at the entrance of Leaves of Grass" did not appear in print as a distinct and cohesive piece until collected by Clifton Joseph Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop (1928), portions of this draft were distilled into "One's-self I Sing," first published as "Inscription" in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman revised this poem before including it as "One's-self I Sing" in 1871, dropping some of the lines only to reintroduce them in "Sands at Seventy" (1888), under the title "Small the Theme of My Chant." Both "One's-self I Sing" and "Small the Theme of My Chant" appeared in the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass. Images of the versos are unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: To the Reader at the Entrance of Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00515
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1860–1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: One of a series of draft introductions Whitman prepared for Leaves of Grass, but which were never printed during Whitman's lifetime. This particular introduction, composed entirely in verse, was reworked and revised multiple times. Though "To the Reader at the Entrance of Leaves of Grass" did not appear in print as a distinct and cohesive piece until collected by Clifton Joseph Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop (1928), portions of this draft were distilled into "One's-self I Sing," first published as "Inscription" in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman revised this poem before including it as "One's-self I Sing" in 1871, dropping some of the lines only to reintroduce them in "Sands at Seventy" (1888), under the title "Small the Theme of My Chant." Both "One's-self I Sing" and "Small the Theme of My Chant" appeared in the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines from this manuscript were also revised and used in the poem, "So Long!," which first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman. 1862.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00026
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 8
Folder: [1862-1863]
Date: 1862-1863
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 102 leaves, handwritten
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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: Inscription
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00010
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This is a draft of the poem "Inscription," which was first published in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. The poem was later revised and published as "One's-Self I Sing." In Leaves of Grass (1891–92), lines from this manuscript appear in both "One's-Self I Sing" and "Small the Theme of My Chant."



Whitman Archive Title: [Man's physiology complete I sing.]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04672
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: about 1867
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript fragment, written in ink and heavily corrected in pencil, contributed to the poem that appeared on the frontispiece of the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass under the title "Inscription." A revised and final version appeared in the 1871-72 edition, as the first poem of the "Inscriptions" cluster, with the title "One's-Self I Sing."


Opera, The

Whitman Archive Title: The voice is a curious organ
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00477
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 38
Repository Title: Glimpses of Walt Whitman
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1850-1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1, handwritten, printed
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript scrap might be part of the missing page 8 of another manuscript by Whitman, "A Visit to the Opera," held at the Huntington Library. These and other manuscripts about opera singing bear an obvious relationship with the article "The Opera," published in Life Illustrated on November 10, 1855, although the details of the relationship are unclear. For a description of the intricacies of these various manuscripts, see Edward Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984) 1:388-398. The manuscript is pasted down, making the verso inaccessible.



Whitman Archive Title: The appearance
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05302
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 1
Folder: Spectacle Inside the Opera House
Date: 1890-1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
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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: A Visit to the Opera
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00038
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository ID: HM 1191
Date: 1855-1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 8 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A relatively clean draft of a journalistic piece, entitled "A Visit to the Opera." No published version in this form has been found, though the draft bears many similarities to "The Opera," an article published in the November 10, 1855 issue of Life Illustrated. It is likely that the present draft represents an early stage in the composition of the published article, but it is also possible that it was created later, as a revision intended for publication in a different periodical. Whitman has numbered the pages, although pages 8 and 9 are missing. The draft is signed "Mose Velsor, of Brooklyn," one of Whitman's commonly-used pseudonyms. For more discussion of this draft's relation to "The Opera" and to several other manuscripts, see Edward Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984) 1:388-397.


Orange Buds by Mail From Florida

Whitman Archive Title: Orange buds by mail
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00165
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 71
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14.5 cm x 24 cm, handwritten
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Content: A manuscript draft of the poem eventually titled "Orange Buds by Mail from Florida" and first published in the New York Herald, March 19, 1888.



Whitman Archive Title: Orange Buds by Mail from Florida
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00001
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 71
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15.5 cm x 32.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript contains a draft version of the note that appears in brackets before the start of the poem titled "Orange Buds by Mail from Florida" and first published in the New York Herald, March 19, 1888. A note at the bottom of the page states: "Sent to H March 17" indicating the draft was likely completed around the time of publication. On the verso the words "Walt Whitman" and "Camden New Jersey" are written in an unknown hand.


Oregon Trail

Whitman Archive Title: The Trail
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00617
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: The Trail (1872). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1872
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, 25 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Notes and drafted lines of an unpublished poem, which Whitman had tentatively titled "The Trail." The lines were written while Whitman was reading The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman, for he has noted it at the top of the first page. The title, written near the bottom of the first page, and "The Emigration to California 1846 '7," on the third page, are written in red ink. The relationship of this draft to Whitman's published work is unknown. All versos are blank.


Origins of Attempted Secession

Whitman Archive Title: Lincoln
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01760
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 37
Folder: ca. 1878–1890, "Abraham Lincoln"
Date: 1870–1874
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten, printed
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Content: Notes on Abraham Lincoln and the political climate leading up to the "attempted secession," including handwritten corrections of printed prose. This manuscript contributed to "Origins of Attempted Secession. Not the whole matter, but some facts worth conning to-day and any day," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). "Origins of Attempted Secession" was first published as part of "'Tis But Ten Years Since [First Paper]," New York Weekly Graphic (24 January 1874). Portions of this essay were revised and used in Memoranda During the War (1875–1876) before appearing in Specimen Days & Collect. Whitman included "Origins of Attempted Secession" in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Putrid Politics
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00342
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 138
Date: 1873–1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft fragment composed on two scraps of paper, pasted together to form one leaf. In this manuscript, Whitman addresses the symptoms and causes of the Civil War. The ideas presented in this manuscript appeared in Memoranda During the War (1875–76) before being revised and collected in Specimen Days & Collect (1882) as "Origins of Attempted Secession: Not the whole matter, but some side facts worth conning to-day and any day." On the verso of one scrap is a draft letter, addressed to A. R. Butts, dated 29 December 1873.


Osceola

Whitman Archive Title: The Commonplace
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00076
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Commonplace (1891). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 27 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one side is a draft of "The Commonplace," which was first published in manuscript facsimile in 1891. On the other side is a cancelled early draft of "Osceola," a poem first published in 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: Osceola
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00037
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: 1889 or 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript is apparently a printer's copy of the poem "Osceola," which was first published in Munyon's Illustrated World in April 1890. This manuscript is bound together with others.


Other Concord Notations

Whitman Archive Title: How I Still Get Around and Take Notes (No. 5)
Whitman Archive ID: buf.00002
Repository: University at Buffalo
Date: 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 24 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A complete draft, with corrections and notes to the printer, of "How I Still Get Around and Take Notes. (No. 5)," a piece of journalism that appeared in The Critic (Vol. I, no. 24) on December 3, 1881. Portions of the piece would later be reprinted as three separate sections of Specimen Days (1882–1883): "A Visit, at the Last, to R. W. Emerson," "Other Concord Notations," and "Boston Common—More of Emerson." The article was also reprinted, with small portions excised, in Alexander Ireland's 1882 volume In Memoriam. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Recollections of His Visits to England in 1833, 1847–8, 1872–3, and Extracts from Unpublished Letters (London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.), 113–115.


Other-Leaves

Whitman Archive Title: [Other-Leaves]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04602
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Our Old Feuillage

Whitman Archive Title: My Spirit sped back to
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00262
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 7
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Some of the words and phrases in this manuscript appear in the first poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The manuscript also bears some resemblance to a line in the 1855 poem eventually titled "A Song for Occupations." The combination of "Love" and "Dilation or Pride" is also articulated in "Chants Democratic" (No. 4) in the 1860–1861 Leaves of Grass, later titled "Our Old Feuillage." The reverse contains one cancelled line: "Not one of the heroic guests."



Whitman Archive Title: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 7
Folder: Photocopies Notebooks [before 1855]
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 31 leaves, handwritten
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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: I know a rich capitalist
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00129
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Emory Holloway has pointed out that Whitman's reference to the sinking of the San Francisco indicates that this notebook, "or at least part of it, is later than 1853." He writes that "it was probably begun in 1854" because the "marble church" in the first passage presumably refers to the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, "which was not completed until then." See Holloway, "A Whitman Manuscript," American Mercury 3 (December 1924), 475–480. See also Andrew C. Higgins, "Art and Argument: The Rise of Walt Whitman's Rhetorical Poetics, 1838-1855," PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1999; and Edward F. Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:128–135. Of the notebook passages that can be identified with published works, most represent early versions of images and phrases from the 1855 poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." One passage clearly contributed to the 1856 poem later titled "Song of the Open Road." Others are possibly connected to the poems eventually titled "A Song for Occupations" and "Great Are the Myths," both first published in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and to the preface for that volume. One passage seems to have contributed to the 1860–1861 poem that Whitman later titled "Our Old Feuillage." One passage is similar to a line in a long manuscript poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures". The first several lines of that poem (not including the line in question) were revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880 and then in Leaves of Grass as part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster (1881–1882, p. 310). No image of the outside back cover of the notebook is available because it has been stitched into a larger volume.



Whitman Archive Title: And there a hunter's camp
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00271
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: On one side are two lines, heavily corrected, from a draft of the poem first published in 1860 as "Chants Democratic 4" and eventually titled "Our Old Feuillage." On the other side are two lightly corrected lines with an uncertain connection to Whitman's published poetry. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "(written for the voice)," "Poem of "(the Devil," and "Poem of Sadness."



Whitman Archive Title: Feuillage
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00185
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 16 leaves, 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
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Content: This poem was originally numbered 89. Whitman also numbered each leaf in the lower-left corner in pencil: the leaves follow the order 1-9, 9 1/2 (a full page despite its number), and 10-15. The expression "the Eightieth year of / These States" at the top of leaf 2 indicates that Whitman was working on this poem as early as 1856. It became section 4 of "Chants Democratic" in 1860. In 1867 Whitman ungrouped it and retitled the poem "American Feuillage," a name it kept until being permanently retitled "Our Old Feuillage" in 1881.



Whitman Archive Title: Our Old Feuillage
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00242
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Our Old Feuillage (1860). A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: between 1876-1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 6 leaves, 20.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: A bound copy of six leaves (the poem "American Feuillage") from the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass with multiple corrections and revisions, including the change of the title to "Our Old Feuillage." The revisions reflect the poem as it appeared in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. "Our Old Feuillage" has also been titled "A Chant of National Feuillage" and "Chants Democratic" No. 4.


Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers

Whitman Archive Title: [March & April, '63]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00926
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 32
Folder: 1863, Mar.-Apr., "War Experiences," proof sheets with corrections
Date: 1863–1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A corrected proof sheet detailing Whitman's work in hospitals during the Civil War. These paragraphs appeared in "Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers. Visits Among Army Hospitals, At Washington, on the Field, and here in New-York" New-York Times (11 December 1864).



Whitman Archive Title: My own visits and distributions
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00060
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1863–1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: A draft of Civil War prose that Whitman later cannibalized and used in various published pieces about the war. Though this manuscript was not printed as a complete prose piece, it appears to be an early draft of "Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers," first published in the 11 December 1864 issue of The New-York Times. Whitman reprinted parts of "Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers" in "'Tis But Ten Years Since," New York Weekly Graphic (14 February 1874, 28 February 1874, and 7 March 1874); in various places in Memoranda During the War (1876); and in various places in Specimen Days (1882). The verso of the final leaf contains a cancelled letter in Whitman's hand, recommending him for employment as a government clerk.



Whitman Archive Title: [writing letters, by the bed-side]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00253
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1863–1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A partial draft of "Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers—Visits Among Army Hospitals, At Washington, on the Field, and here in New-York," first published in the New York Times, 11 December 1864. Though parts of "Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers" were partially reprinted in the New York Weekly Graphic (1874), Memoranda During the War (1876), and Specimen Days (1882), the portion which appears in this draft was not reprinted until after Whitman's death in The Wound Dresser (1898). An image of the verso is unavailable.


Out from Behind This Mask

Whitman Archive Title: Veil with their lids, &c
Whitman Archive ID: usc.00001
Repository: University of South Carolina: Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Repository Title: "Veil with their lids," Manuscript poem
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 23 x 14.1, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript of the poem "Penitenzia," unpublished in Whitman's lifetime. The poem is apparently based on a photograph of Whitman possibly taken by the photographer, William Kurtz, in the 1860s. A note at the top of the manuscript, in Whitman's hand, reads, "p. 10 Passage to India," indicating that the poem might have been intended for inclusion in the volume of that name (Passage to India) published in 1870. An earlier draft of this poem appears in a notebook now in the Feinberg Collection at the Library of Congress and was the basis for a version titled "Mask with Their Lids," published in Clifton J. Furness's Walt Whitman's Workshop and Harold W. Blodgett and Scully Bradley's Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. The lines seem to anticipate the poem, "Out from Behind This Mask," first published in the New York Tribune on February 19, 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Returning to my pages' front once
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00088
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Out from Behind This Mask (1876). A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1871 and 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of the poem "Out From Behind This Mask," first published in the New York Tribune on February 19, 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Out From Behind This Mask
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00252
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Out From Behind this Mask (1876). Printed Copy.
Date: about 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15.5 x 13.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A corrected copy of "Out From Behind This Mask," cut from pages 24 and 25 of Two Rivulets and pasted together to make one page.



Whitman Archive Title: Out from behind this Mask
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00244
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Out from Behind This Mask (1876). A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1873-1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Draft of the poem "Out From Behind This Mask," first published in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Out from this Mask
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00245
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Out from Behind This Mask (1876). A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1873-1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of the poem "Out From Behind This Mask," first published in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Out From This Mask
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00246
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Out from Behind This Mask (1876). A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1873-1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Draft of the poem "Out From Behind This Mask," first published in 1876, written on two leaves. On the verso is a draft of a letter Whitman sent to Webster Elmes on 14 August 1873, arranging for a substitute, following his stroke, to cover his work as a clerk in Washington, D. C.



Whitman Archive Title: Out from behind this Mask
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00247
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Out from Behind This Mask (1876). A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1873-1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of the poem "Out From Behind This Mask," first published in 1876. The title is written in blue pencil.



Whitman Archive Title: [(Returning to my pages front once]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00248
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Out from Behind This Mask (1876). A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1873-1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of the poem "Out From Behind This Mask," first published in 1876, written on two scraps pasted together.



Whitman Archive Title: [This designation of Myself]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00249
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Out from Behind This Mask (1876). A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1873-1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of lines from the poem "Out From Behind This Mask," first published in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: [here strange continents]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00250
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Out from Behind This Mask (1876). A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1873-1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of lines from the poem "Out From Behind This Mask," first published in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Behind this Mask
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00251
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Out from Behind This Mask (1876). A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1873-1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Notes and trial lines for the poem "Out From Behind This Mask," first published in 1876, written on the verso of a letter to Whitman from Minnie Vincent, dated Utica, New York, December 11, 1873, asking for an autograph).



Whitman Archive Title: Out from Behind this Mask
Whitman Archive ID: bpl.00001
Repository: Boston Public Library: The Walt Whitman Collection
Repository Title: Ten pieces of manuscript
Repository ID: Whitman Mss.1
Date: About 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a signed draft of "Out from Behind This Mask," first published in the New York Daily Tribune (19 February 1876), which contains only a version of Part 1 of the poem.


Out of May's Shows Selected

Whitman Archive Title: Out of May's shows selected
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00005
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 7
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a manuscript draft of the poem, "Out of May's Shows Selected," which was first published in the New York Herald on May 10, 1888. Reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888).


Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

Whitman Archive Title: [June 26 '59]
Whitman Archive ID: med.00774
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: about 1859
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Edward F. Grier includes a transcription of this missing manuscript in Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York University, 1984), 405–410. Grier's transcription is pieced together from "photostats of six surviving pages" (held in the Harned collection at the Library of Congress) and from two partial transcriptions, made by Emory Holloway and currently held at the University of Kansas, as well as Clifton Joseph Furness's Walt Whitman's Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts (Harvard University Press, 1928) and Emory Holloway's The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (Doubleday, Page & Company, 1921). This manuscript includes an early draft of "In Paths Untrodden," first published as the first section of "Calamus" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Also included in this manuscript is a draft of "That Shadow My Likeness," first published in New-York Saturday Press 4 February 1860 as "Poemet." This poem later appeared as "Calamus No. 40," Leaves of Grass (1860); as "That Shadow My Likeness," Leaves of Grass (1867); and, with slight changes in the text, in Leaves of Grass (1881–1882). Other portions of this manuscript are suggestive of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", first published in New-York Saturday Press (24 December 1859) as "A Child's Reminiscence." This poem later appeared as "A Word Out of the Sea," Leaves of Grass (1860); as "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," in "Sea-Shore Memories," Passage to India (1871); and finally in "Sea-Drift," Leaves of Grass (1881–1882).



Whitman Archive Title: A Child's Reminiscence
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00005
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Box: Cased.
Date: about 1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 19 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Printer's copy of the poem "A Child's Reminiscence," which appeared in the New-York Saturday Press on 24 December 1859. This poem later appeared as "A Word Out of the Sea" in Leaves of Grass (1860); as "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" in "Sea-Shore Memories," Passage to India (1871); and finally in "Sea Drift," Leaves of Grass (1881–82).



Whitman Archive Title: Notebook, 1860-1861
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00029
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Out of A Hundred Years
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00079
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Leave-taking Words
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00078
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Outlines for a Tomb

Whitman Archive Title: ? Gliding through these the three
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00022
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: II-5 17
Date: 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A fragment describing street and interior scenes similar to those in "Outlines for a Tomb." "Outlines for a Tomb" was first published in The Galaxy in January 1870 under the title "Brother of All, with Generous Hand," and finally in 1881 under the title "Outlines for a Tomb."


Pallid Wreath, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Pallid Wreath
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00074
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Draft of the poem "The Pallid Wreath," which was published in the Critic 18 (10 January 1891) and reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891). The original envelope containing the draft and comments to the editor of the Critic is included.


Passage to India [book]

Whitman Archive Title: Thou vast Rondure, swimming in space
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00084
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository Title: Thou vast rondure, swimming in space: autograph manuscript poem signed
Repository ID: MA 8645
Date: about 1868
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A fair copy of a poem titled, "Thou vast Rondure, swimming in space," that Whitman attempted to publish in several venues, to no avail. In December 1868 Whitman sent a copy of this poem to John Morley, then editor of the Fortnightly Review. Morley replied that he could not print the poem until April. For the solicitation to the Fortnightly Review, see Whitman's December 17, 1868 letter to Morley. On 20 January 1869 , Whitman sent the poem to James T. Fields at the Atlantic Monthly. Unaccountably, the poem did not appear in print. Parts of the poem were reworked and first published as section five of "Passage to India" (1871). A facsimile of this manuscript appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 26 October 1911. For more on the publication history of "Thou vast Rondure, swimming in space," see Joann P. Krieg, "Holograph Manuscript of 'Thou Vast Rondure' Comes to Light On Long Island," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 5 (Summer 1987), 32-36.



Whitman Archive Title: As of Eternity
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00307
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two leaves of pink paper, both 21 x 13 cm, in black ink, with minor revisions in the same ink. Pinholes mostly in center and at top of both pages. This poem became section 21 of "Calamus" in 1860; the lines on the first manuscript page became verses 1-6, and those on the second ("I hear not the volumes of/ sound merely—...") became 7-9. Retitled "That Music Always Round Me" in 1867, it was transferred in 1871 to the "Whispers of Heavenly Death" cluster in Passage to India. In 1881 Whitman incorporated it, with the rest of the cluster, in the main body of Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [O dying! Always dying!]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00319
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21.5 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one light blue Williamsburgh tax blank (21.5 x 12 cm), in dark brown ink, with revisions in fine pen and pencil. Whitman penciled in a question mark, in parentheses, next to the title. With the addition of the new first line "O love!" this became section 27 of "Calamus" in 1860. In the 1867 Leaves it was retitled "O Living Always—Always Dying!" Whitman next transferred it to the "Passage to India" supplement bound in with Leaves, where it reappeared in 1876; in the 1881 Leaves Whitman permanently added it to the cluster "Whispers of Heavenly Death."



Whitman Archive Title: Passage to India
Whitman Archive ID:
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 23
Folder: Passage to India. Page Proofs.
Date: about 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: , printed, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Page proofs of Walt Whitman's book of 1871, Passage to India, with several (mostly minor) corrections in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: Passage to India
Whitman Archive ID: har.00004
Repository: Harvard University: Manuscripts Department, Houghton Library
Repository ID: MS Lowell 15
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 21 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A complete draft, with extensive revisions, of "Passage to India," a poem first published in 1871 in a small volume of the same name. "Passage to India" was later included as a supplement to the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass. This particular draft includes passages cut from letterpress proofs and is bound with a letter to Andrew and Thomas Rome, dated 15 March 1870. Most of the verso images are unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Veil with their lids, &c
Whitman Archive ID: usc.00001
Repository: University of South Carolina: Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Repository Title: "Veil with their lids," Manuscript poem
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 23 x 14.1, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript of the poem "Penitenzia," unpublished in Whitman's lifetime. The poem is apparently based on a photograph of Whitman possibly taken by the photographer, William Kurtz, in the 1860s. A note at the top of the manuscript, in Whitman's hand, reads, "p. 10 Passage to India," indicating that the poem might have been intended for inclusion in the volume of that name (Passage to India) published in 1870. An earlier draft of this poem appears in a notebook now in the Feinberg Collection at the Library of Congress and was the basis for a version titled "Mask with Their Lids," published in Clifton J. Furness's Walt Whitman's Workshop and Harold W. Blodgett and Scully Bradley's Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. The lines seem to anticipate the poem, "Out from Behind This Mask," first published in the New York Tribune on February 19, 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Thou Vast Rondure, Swimming in Space
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00309
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Thou Vast Rondure, Swimming in Space (1868?). Offprint.
Date: between 1868-1869
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 32 x 13.5 cm, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An offprint of "Thou Vast Rondure, Swimming in Space," with note at the top reading "J. T. Trowbridge, from W. W." and a note on the verso reading "is to app. in London Fortnightly for April." Though the poem was submitted in either 1868 or 1869, it was never published in the Fortnightly. It was later incorporated in the poem "Passage to India," which was first published in 1871. "Thou Vast Rondure, Swimming in Space" was not published as a separate poem.



Whitman Archive Title: from the traditional commencement
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02806
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Allude to the Suez
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05312
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Passage to India
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00077
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1869–1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 13 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
Content: Notes and drafted lines for the poem "Passage to India," first published in a small volume of the same name in 1871. It was later included as a supplement to the second issue of the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass. The first page features the watermark of "Platner & Porter, Congress" in the upper right-hand corner.



Whitman Archive Title: The Soul's Procession
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00121
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 93
Repository Title: The Soul's Procession
Repository ID: #5604
Date: 1869-1871
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 16 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18
Content: This handmade notebook contains notes for a projected poem, "The Soul's Procession," as well as a newspaper clipping attached to the third leaf, entitled "The Steamship Pereire Disaster" and dated January 28, 1869. Whitman never finished or published this poem, but various passages are similar to ideas and language in the poem "Passage to India," first published in the 1871-1872 edition of Leaves of Grass and retained in all subsequent editions.



Whitman Archive Title: Passage to India
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00080
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1870-1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 23 leaves, numbered 1-21, with pages designated "5 1/2" and "5 3/4.", 25.2 by 20 to 31.2 by 20.5 cm., 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
Content: Revised draft of the poem "Passage to India," first published in a small volume of the same name in 1871. It was later included as a supplement to the second issue of the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass. At some point before March 15, 1870 , Whitman had an early draft of the poem set in print by Andrew and Thomas Rome (the printers of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass). Whitman then used the printed pages to make edits and corrections, which he subsequently sent to publisher J.S. Redfield, who ultimately printed the finished book. Since this particular draft contains portions of the printed poem pasted onto the manuscript pages, it most likely dates from after March 1870. At the repository, the draft is accompanied by a typewritten memorandum by Emory Holloway, as well as typewritten letters from Amy Lowell and Clifton Joseph Furness to Oscar Lion; images of these items are not available.



Whitman Archive Title: Leave-taking Words
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00078
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Fables
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00235
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 23 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This poem became numbered verse paragraph 4 of section 2 of the title poem in the separate 1871 publication "Passage to India." In 1881 the poem "Passage to India" was transferred, ungrouped, to the main body of Leaves of Grass.


Patent-Office Hospital

Whitman Archive Title: [I go around]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00097
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 45
Repository Title: I go around among these sights...
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1860-1863
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript is possibly an early draft of another manuscript held at the University of Texas-Austin, entitled "The Army Hospitals." That manuscript was used in the first paragraph of the article "The Great Army of the Sick," which was published in the New York Times on February 26, 1863. The contents of both these manuscripts contributed to "Feb. 23," published in Memoranda During the War (1875-1876) and "Patent-Office Hospital" published in Specimen Days in 1882 (later retained in the Complete Prose Works, published in 1892).



Whitman Archive Title: The Army Hospitals
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00288
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: 1863
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Partial manuscript draft of an essay about the Civil War army hospitals. From its relationship with another manuscript now at the University of Virginia (tex.00097), it is clear that this manuscript represents a prepublication stage of the article "The Great Army of the Sick," which was published in the New-York Times on February 26, 1863. Whitman later used a part of the published article (a part that has no parallel in the present manuscript) for the one-paragraph description of the "Patent Office Hospital" in Memoranda During the War (1875–76), labelled " Feb. 23. " The paragraph later appeared as "Patent-Office Hospital" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and in Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman's revision of the title (which he made by cutting the top of the leaf, turning it over, and writing a new title) indicates both that he originally imagined this to be the first of a series of articles and that the present manuscript was intended to serve as a printer's copy.


Patroling Barnegat

Whitman Archive Title: The Patrol at Barnegat
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00254
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Patroling Barnegat. (1880). A.MS. drafts.
Date: 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: An early draft entitled "The Patrol at Barnegat," containing trial lines for the poem first published as "Patroling Barnegat" in the June 1880 issue of The American. On the reverse of one leaf is a letter to Whitman from E. H. Hames & Co. of The Literary World magazine dated May 12, 1880.



Whitman Archive Title: The Patrol at Barnegat
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00255
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Patroling Barnegat. (1880). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: A draft entitled "The Patrol at Barnegat," containing trial lines for the poem first published as "Patrolling Barnegat" in the April 1881 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine. The draft was originally titled "The Sea Beach Patrol," then "The Sea Shore Patrol," and finally "The Patrol at Barnegat." On the verso of the draft are two receipts from the Philadelphia Y.M.C.A., dated March 22, 1880 and April 15, 1880, and an unfinished letter from Whitman to John Burroughs, dated August 20.



Whitman Archive Title: The Patrol at Barnegat
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00256
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Patroling Barnegat. (1880). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A heavily-corrected draft of the poem published as "Patrolling Barnegat" in the April 1881 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine.



Whitman Archive Title: Patroling Barnegat
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00258
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Patroling Barnegat (1880). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A proof sheet of "Patroling Barnegat," with a correction in Whitman's hand. The poem was first published as "Patrolling Barnegat" in the April 1881 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine.



Whitman Archive Title: Patroling Barnegat
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02403
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Patroling Barnegat (1880). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A proof sheet of "Patroling Barnegat," with a correction in Whitman's hand. The poem was first published as "Patrolling Barnegat" in the April 1881 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine.



Whitman Archive Title: [Wild, wild the storm and the]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00257
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Patroling Barnegat (1880)
Date: May 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A heavily revised draft of "Patroling Barnegat," first published in the April 1881 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine as "Patrolling Barnegat."



Whitman Archive Title: Patroling Barnegat
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00041
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 4
Repository Title: Patroling Barnegat
Date: 1880 or 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof sheet with handwritten corrections, apparently prepared for the April 1881 publication of "Patroling Barnegat" in Harper's Monthly. The poem had been first published in The American in June 1880. It was later reprinted in Leaves of Grass (1881–82 and 1891–92).


Paumanok

Whitman Archive Title: Paumanok
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00002
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 3
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a manuscript draft of the poem, "Paumanok," which was first published in the New York Herald on February 29, 1888. Reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: Paumanok
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00259
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Paumanok (1888). A.MS. copy.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12 x 21 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in ink on a sheet of white paper, cut from a larger sheet, is a late draft of "Paumanok," first published in 1888. It is signed in full at bottom. The word "personal" is partially encircled in the upper right-hand corner. In pencil on verso in another hand: "Feb 18, 1888."



Whitman Archive Title: Paumanok
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00260
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Paumanok (post-1888). Newspaper clipping.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 22 x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A small newspaper clipping of "Paumanok" pasted onto a larger sheet of paper, with notes and corrections in Whitman's hand. "Paumanok" was first published in the New York Herald in 1888.



Whitman Archive Title: Paumanok
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00166
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 75
Date: early 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a draft of the poem titled "Paumanok" first published in the New York Herald, February 29, 1888. Notes at the top state "pub'd" and "personal." A note at the bottom states "sent to Herald Feb 27 '88" indicating the draft was likely completed around the time of publication.


Paumanok, and My Life on it as Child and Young Man

Whitman Archive Title: The wreck of the "Mexico"
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05318
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


Paumanok Picture, A

Whitman Archive Title: The whip sting ray
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00094
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: The whip sting ray
Date: about 1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A manuscript fragment discussing the dangers of the "whip sting ray"—much "dreaded by fishermen" in the New York area. These prose notes bear no known relationship to Whitman's published works. However, at the top of the manuscript are cancelled lines which read: "and winrows are the green backed spotted mossbonkers . . . the fishermen stand in negligent ease, poised on their strong limbs—." Whitman used these cancelled lines, in slightly revised form, in the poem that would eventually be known as "A Paumanok Picture." First published as part of "Poem of Salutation" in Leaves of Grass (1856), then as part of "Salut au Monde" in the 1860–1861, 1867, and 1871–1872 editions of Leaves; these lines were later extracted and published as a separate poem, "A Paumanok Picture," in Leaves of Grass (1881–82 and 1891–92). An image of the verso is unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: [How can there be immortality]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00014
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4.5 x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These lines, appearing on a very small section of white laid paper cut and cropped irregularly, bear a strong resemblance to the (eventual) second verse paragraph in section 6 of "Starting from Paumanok," first published in 1860 as "Proto-Leaf." The fragmentary lines on the verso (beginning "Downward, buoyant, swif[t]"), represent a different version of a line incorporated in the pre-1855 notebook poem "Pictures" and of one inscribed in the 1854 notebook [I know a rich capitalist...], currently housed at the New York Public Library.


Peace no more

Whitman Archive Title: [Peace no more]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00261
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Peace No More, But Flag of War. A.MS. draft.
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 16 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft beginning "Peace no more, but flag of war" written in pencil on a sheet of white paper, with a corner cut out, on which the last two lines of the poem had been written. On the verso is a list of words. The relationship of this draft to Whitman's published work is unknown.


Penitenzia

Whitman Archive Title: [Mask with their lids thine eyes]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00262
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Penitenzia. A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A draft of a poem never published in Whitman's lifetime, but published posthumously as "[Mask with Their Lids]." The draft was evidently part of a larger notebook titled "Penitenzia," but no other pages from such a notebook are present in this folder. The folder also contains two pages from Clifton Joseph Furness's book Walt Whitman's Workshop concerning the draft.



Whitman Archive Title: Veil with their lids, &c
Whitman Archive ID: usc.00001
Repository: University of South Carolina: Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Repository Title: "Veil with their lids," Manuscript poem
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 23 x 14.1, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript of the poem "Penitenzia," unpublished in Whitman's lifetime. The poem is apparently based on a photograph of Whitman possibly taken by the photographer, William Kurtz, in the 1860s. A note at the top of the manuscript, in Whitman's hand, reads, "p. 10 Passage to India," indicating that the poem might have been intended for inclusion in the volume of that name (Passage to India) published in 1870. An earlier draft of this poem appears in a notebook now in the Feinberg Collection at the Library of Congress and was the basis for a version titled "Mask with Their Lids," published in Clifton J. Furness's Walt Whitman's Workshop and Harold W. Blodgett and Scully Bradley's Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. The lines seem to anticipate the poem, "Out from Behind This Mask," first published in the New York Tribune on February 19, 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Veil with their lids thine eyes, O Soul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00312
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To the Man-of-War-Bird (1876). A.MS. drafts.
Date: between 1867-1876
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: One of the notebooks commonly known as the "Penitenzia" notebooks because that word is written in red ink on the covers. It includes drafts and trial lines of the poem "Penitenzia," (published posthumously as "Mask with Their Lids"). loc.02901 is another "Penitenzia" notebook that also has drafts and trial lines for the poem.



Whitman Archive Title: for part in L of G
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02901
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To the Man-of-War-Bird (1876). A.MS. drafts.
Date: between 1867-1876
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 9 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18
Content: One of the notebooks commonly known as the "Penitenzia" notebooks because that word is written in red ink on the cover. It includes drafts and trial lines of the poem "[Mask with Their Lids]" (published posthumously.) loc.00312 is another "Penitenzia" notebook that also has drafts and trial lines for the poem "[Mask with Their Lids]." There are also notes about other poems and the arrangement of Leaves of Grass.


Pensive and Faltering

Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


Pensive on Her Dead Gazing

Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 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
Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


People and John Quincy Adams, The

Whitman Archive Title: [I was down in New Orleans]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00353
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 31
Folder: ca. 1848–1849. "The People and John Quincy Adams"
Date: 1848–1849
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1
Content: A corrected proof of "The People and John Quincy Adams," which appeared in the New Orleans Daily Crescent while Whitman was editor of that newspaper in 1848–1849. No image of the verso is currently available.


Personal

Whitman Archive Title: A Book of "Contemporaneous Notes."
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01035
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "Notes on Richard M. Bucke's Book," draft
Date: 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft notice describing Richard M. Bucke's plans to publish a book titled, Contemporaneous Notes of Walt Whitman. This notice appeared unsigned in the 2 November 1881 issue of the Boston Evening Transcript under the heading, "Personal."


Pictures

Whitman Archive Title: Poem incarnating the mind
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00346
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Two scenes capriciously rising out of the past]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00039
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Children of Adam. A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1850-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 26.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Portions appear to be trial lines for a poem entitled "Pictures" published posthumously, first in 1925. Other lines have an unknown relationship to Whitman's published work.



Whitman Archive Title: Pictures
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00081
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 137
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 27 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
Content: Bound draft of a poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures." The first several lines of draft were revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880.



Whitman Archive Title: All that we are
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00023
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: II-5 21
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of fifteen lines of poetry, first published only after Whitman's death in Notes and Fragments (1899). The last three lines on this manuscript leaf appear in another version in a long manuscript, "Pictures," which probably dates to the 1850s and is held at the Beinecke Library, Yale.


Pilot in the Mist, The

Whitman Archive Title: Diary in Canada
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00151
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Diaries, Diary Notes, and Address Books
Box: 2
Folder: June-Aug. 1880. Diary in Canada Vol. II.
Date: 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: , handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Whitman's diary from his trip to Canada in 1880. William White, in his edition of Whitman's Daybooks and Notebooks, noted a relationship between material in this notebook and the poem "The Pilot in the Mist."



Whitman Archive Title: Fancies at Navesink
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00014
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Fancies at Navesink, the Pilot in the mist
Repository ID: HM 1190
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of "Pilot in the Mist," the first in the eight-poem sequence "Fancies at Navesink," first published in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. On the verso is a letter dated October 3, 1884 to Whitman from Richard Hines requesting information about Martin Farquhar Tupper.


Pioneers! O Pioneers!

Whitman Archive Title: Pioneers! O Pioneers!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00263
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Pioneers! O Pioneers! (1865). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of the first two stanzas of "Pioneers! O Pioneers!," which was first published in 1865, written in ink on a rough, bluish piece of paper. On the verso is a note in pencil concerning wounded soldiers.


Play-Ground, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Play-Ground
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00264
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: The Play-Ground (1846). A.MS. draft.
Date: About 1846
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 16.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of the early poem "The Play-Ground," nearly as it appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on June 1, 1846 (during Whitman's editorship of the paper). On the verso is a page of prose in Whitman's hand.


Plays and Operas too

Whitman Archive Title: Specimen Days
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00679
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Date: about 1880
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A small scrap on which Whitman has written "Specimen Days" at the top in red ink. The manuscript contains a short note about Giulia Grisi and Giuseppe Mario, two opera singers who Whitman saw in New York in the 1850s, and who Whitman mentions in the section of Specimen Days entitled "Plays and Operas too." Edward Grier dates the manuscript, based on the paper and ink, to around 1880 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984] 3:1064). The manuscript is pasted to a backing sheet, making the verso inaccessible.



Whitman Archive Title: Two or three memories
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05304
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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."


Poem (bequeathing to

Whitman Archive Title: Poem (bequeathing to others a charge) what poems are wanted
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00270
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Manuscript with idea for a poem to include "a long list" drawn from other (unidentified) manuscript scraps. This fragment has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Poem of Poets (now) in all lands." An image of the verso is unavailable.


Poem among the Siamese

Whitman Archive Title: Poem among the Siamese
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00050
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 158
Date: 1854-1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, print
View images: 1
Content: A leaf of paper with several clippings pasted to it, as well as handwritten comments by Whitman. The clippings deal with Siamese proverbs and poems, as well as "the absurd chronology of the Hindoos." Whitman's handwritten comment at the top of page indicates that he may have been considering a poem entitled "Poem among the Siamese". At the bottom of the page is a chunk of text which may be a draft poetic line or else notes about possible elements to include in the poem. An image of the verso is unavailable.


Poem ante-dating

Whitman Archive Title: Poem ante-dating
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00288
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript idea for a poem that would prophesy the "great results" to be had "a hundred years hence." This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "An After Thought or Two" and "Poem, as in a rapt and."


Poem illustrative of the woman

Whitman Archive Title: Poem illustrative of the Woman under the 'new dispensation'
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00303
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Date: 1850-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 17 cm x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes and trial lines, written in ink, for a poem about the future of women.


Poem L'Envoy

Whitman Archive Title: Poem L'Envoy
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00289
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: before 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Note for a poem. It is unclear whether this manuscript is connected to any of Whitman's published poetry. The reverse contains a fragmentary set of notes for a game of "Twenty Questions." This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Banjo Poem," "Poem [?The Cruise]," and "of Death—the song."


Poem of

Whitman Archive Title: [Poem of]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00006
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4 x 8 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These notes, on a very small scrap of paper, could have represented an early stage of a number of poems.


Poem of a proud

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of a proud
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00266
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: before 1861
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Manuscript with ideas for a poem of "joyous expression" about Manhattan, of which the connection to Whitman's published work is unknown. This fragment has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "The most Jubilant Triumphant Poem." An image of the verso is not available.


Poem of different Incidents

Whitman Archive Title: [?Poem of different incidents]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00295
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Date: 1850-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 7.5 cm x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes toward a "poem of different incidents," written in ink on pink paper.


Poem of Fruits & Flowers

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Fruits & Flowers
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00255
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 30
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Ideas for three different poems about various topics. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Poem of Wisconsin." An image of the verso is unavailable.


Poem of Kisses

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Kisses
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00301
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Date: Before 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 5 cm x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The name of the proposed poem, "Poem of Kisses," recalls the title format used in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. Based on the topic and the manuscript's appearance in Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments (1899) with transcriptions of other early manuscripts, Edward Grier speculates that Whitman wrote this before 1860 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1344). This manuscript may relate to "Song In Poem of kisses" (uva.00302).


Poem of Language

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Language
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00251
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 30
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Manuscript containing ideas for a poem about the variety of languages and sounds. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Whole Poem." An image of the verso is unavailable.


Poem of Names

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Names
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00294
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Date: 1850-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 7.5 cm x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Pencil on white paper. Pasted on top half of archival leaf.



Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Names
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00294
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Repository Title: "Studies of Womanhood," [ca. 1850–1860]
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The name of this proposed poem, "Poem of Names," recalls the title phrasing used in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. It is possible that this manuscript thus dates from before or early in 1856. Edward Grier dates it to the 1850s, based on the handwriting (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1310).


Poem of Ohio

Whitman Archive Title: —Poem of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00253
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 30
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: List of ideas for poems, mostly about various states. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "To the English." An image of the verso is unavailable.


Poem of the Ancient

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of the Ancient
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00039
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: probably before 1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Notes toward a poem on the "earth," "heavens," and "the Ancient." On the verso are some numbers and calculations. No image of the verso is available.


Poem of the Black person

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of the Black Person
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00267
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript with ideas for a poem expressing the "sentiment" of a "sweeping . . . protection of the blacks." It seems that no such poem ever emerged.


Poem of the Drum

Whitman Archive Title: [Poem of the Drum]
Whitman Archive ID: med.00732
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: about 1861
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: A brief note of twenty-seven words, sketching the idea for a poem "that shall be alive with the stirring and beating of a drum." The current location of this manuscript is unknown, and its contents are attested only by a transcription published by Richard Maurice Bucke in Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 179. Whitman's poetry contains many references to the beating of drums, so one cannot be certain which, if any, of the poems is related to this manuscript. The most likely candidate, however, is "Beat! Beat! Drums!" Whitman's only poem that not only mentions drums but treats them as its central subject. First published simultaneously in the 28 September 1861 issues of Harper's Weekly and the New York Leader, it later appeared in Drum-Taps (1865) and in subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass.


Poem of the Husband

Whitman Archive Title: ? Poem of the Husband
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00281
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: List of ideas for poems about "the husband," "the wife," and "marriage." This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "A poem which more."


Poem of the Sunlight

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of the Sunlight
Whitman Archive ID: med.00779
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: unknown
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Brief note of just eight words, outlining the possibility of a "Poem of the Sunlight." A transcription of this manuscript, the current location of which is unknown, was published by Richard Maurice Bucke in Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 174. Edward F. Grier, editor of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 4:1383, suggests that this manuscript might be related to the poem "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun," which was first published in the 1865 volume Drum-Taps.


Poem of the Trainer

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of the Trainer
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06005
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: The voice of Walt Whitman
Date: Betwee late 1855 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: One leaf made by pasting together two scraps of pink paper, probably wrappers from the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. This portion of the manuscript contains the title "Poem of the Trainer," written in ink. This title is not known to have any relationship to Whitman's published works. Whitman's titling of poems as "Poem of..." began with the 1856 edition of Leaves and was retained, although to a lesser extent, in future editions. Given this, and the use of the 1855 wrapper paper, this note was likely written sometime between late 1855 and 1860. This scrap is attached to another scrap (loc.07550) that contains several fragmentary lines written in pencil describing a whale hunt, likely related to lines on the same topic in "A Song of Joys." On the reverse of the two scraps (loc.06004) are approximately four lines, written and revised in ink, about the 1833 Leonid meteor shower, likely related to the poem "Year of Meteors. (1859–1860)."


Poem of The Woods

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of The Woods
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00043
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 4
Repository Title: Poem of the Woods
Date: probably between 1860 and 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes toward a poem to be titled either "Poem of the Woods" or "Poem of the Prairies," intended for a "Chicago edition" that never materialized. Any relationship between this manuscript and Whitman's published work is unknown. The notes are written on the back of a page from Sartain's Magazine, which folded in 1852.


Poem of Triumph

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Triumph
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00032
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Poem of Triumph
Date: probably between 1860 and 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Prose notes, draft lines, and trial titles for a poem or perhaps several poems about a triumphant attitude toward approaching death. One of the notes shows that Whitman considered writing a poem that would include a list of what poems are yet wanted. No relationship is known between this manuscript and Whitman's published work.


Poem of Wisconsin

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Wisconsin
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00308
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 30
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: List of ideas for poems, mostly about various states, including an allusion to a possible "Western Edition." This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Poem of Fruits & Flowers," and an image of the verso is unavailable.


Poem Poem

Whitman Archive Title: Poem
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00120
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date:
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A newspaper clipping pasted onto a piece of paper, with Whitman's handwritten notes in the margins. The title "Poem" and the first note indicate that he is deriving an idea for a new poem from the newspaper excerpt, which deals with the "ennobling" effect of struggles and hardships one may face in life.


Poem ?The

Whitman Archive Title: Poem [?The Cruise]
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00291
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Scrap with what are apparently two trial versions of a title. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Poem L'Envoy," "Banjo Poem," and "of Death—the song."


poem theme Be happy, A]

Whitman Archive Title: A poem theme
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00707
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: Box II-5B 102
Date: 1850-1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, print
View images: 1
Content: A green scrap of paper with a brief note about a potential theme for a poem: "Be happy." Below the note is pasted a newspaper clipping with a story attributed to Aristotle. There is no known connection between the note or the clipping to Whitman's published poetry or prose. An image of the verso is unavailable.


Poem There can be no

Whitman Archive Title: Poem [There can be no greatest]
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00268
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes toward a poem comparing the progress of "the divine man" to the geological development of the earth, of which the connection to Whitman's published works is unknown.


poem which more, A

Whitman Archive Title: A poem which more
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00280
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: 1845–1892
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript note for a poem addressing Whitman's future readers. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "? Poem of the Husband."


Poemet Leaf

Whitman Archive Title: Poemet
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00307
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 33
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Lists of synonyms for "poem."


Poems identifying the

Whitman Archive Title: Poems identifying the different branches of the sciences
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00072
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 30
Date: about 1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: List of ideas for poems about astronomy, geology, chemistry, mathematics, and music. An image of the verso is unavailable.


Poetry To-Day in America—Shakspere—the Future

Whitman Archive Title: [in Poetry of the Future]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00076
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: 1865–1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A partial draft of "Poetry of the Future," first published in North American Review 132 (February 1881), 195–210. Whitman revised this essay and reprinted it as "Poetry To-day in America—Shakespere—the Future" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83).



Whitman Archive Title: Though so loving
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00183
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 99
Date: 1870-1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript fragment comparing an unnamed poet (the repository finding aid suggests that it is Tennyson) to Walter Scott. It also contains a parenthetical description of Thomas Jefferson's assessment of Scott, a description which is echoed in Whitman's essay "The Poetry of the Future," which was first published in the North American Review in February 1881. The essay would later be revised, reprinted, and retitled "Poetry To-day in America—Shakspere—The Future" in Specimen Days (1882) and Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: born expressers of itself
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01050
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "Spirit of Transactions," draft
Date: about 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A partial draft of "Poetry To-Day in America—Shakespere—The Future," which appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882) before being collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: The Poetry of the War at last
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00165
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: c. 1880, Poetry of the War At Last
Date: about 1880
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A prose draft entitled "The Poetry of the War at last," used for the essay "Poetry To-Day in America—Shakspere—the Future," which was published in the "Collect" section of Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883).



Whitman Archive Title: Still the rule and demesne
Whitman Archive ID: nyh.00007
Repository: New-York Historical Society
Repository Title: Walt Whitman photograph and autograph fragment, approximately 1881, 1910.
Repository ID: MS 2958.9805
Date: 1880-1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3
Content: This prose manuscript fragment appears to be an early draft of lines that appear in the essay "The Poetry of the Future" first published in the February 1881 issue of The North American Review. Whitman revised and republished it several times. In Specimen Days & Collect (1883) the essay was titled "Poetry To-Day in America—Shakspere—the Future." The draft fragment is written on a small piece of paper that is pasted on a separate leaf below a portrait of Whitman. Since the manuscript was pasted down, an image of the verso is unavailable. The verso of the portrait includes a handwritten note from Horace Traubel presenting the portrait and manuscript to Frank and Mildred Bain.



Whitman Archive Title: Poetry to-day in America
Whitman Archive ID: fol.00002
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library
Repository Title: Poetry today in America--Shakespeare--the future [manuscript], 1881
Repository ID: S.a.106
Date: 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 8 leaves, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16
Content: Page proofs of Whitman's essay "The Poetry of the Future" with numerous corrections in Whitman's hand. The essay appeared in the February 1881 issue of The North American Review. These corrections were made after the piece's initial publication, and reflect changes that Whitman made before the essay was retitled "Poetry to-day in America—Shakspere—the Future" and included in Specimen Days in 1882. It would also be reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [Then Principal]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00303
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two scraps, pasted together, on which are inscribed a heavily revised, partial draft of the essay first published as "The Poetry of the Future" in the February 12, 1881, issue of the North American Review. Whitman later revised and republished the essay as "Poetry To-Day in America—Shakspere—The Future" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83). It also appeared in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [Not free and naive poetry]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00304
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1881
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Manuscript fragment of the essay first published as "The Poetry of the Future" in the February 12, 1881, issue of the North American Review. Whitman later revised and republished the essay as "Poetry To-Day in America—Shakspere—The Future" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83). It also appeared in Complete Prose Works (1892). The leaf has been pasted to a backing sheet, rendering the verso inaccessible.


Poets to Come

Whitman Archive Title: Merely What I tell is
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00271
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These manuscript lines were probably written in the 1850s. They bear a strong resemblance to ideas expressed in the opening lines of poem #14 of "Chants Democratic and Native American," which first appeared in the 1860 Leaves of Grass. The lines eventually became part of the independent poem "Poets to Come." A series of draft lines are written on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00272).



Whitman Archive Title: Merely What I tell is
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00272
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Based on the material written on the back of this leaf, this manuscript was probably written in the 1850s. The lines do not appear to have contributed directly to any of Whitman's published poetry. Draft lines on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00271) probably relate to the poem eventually titled "Poets to Come."



Whitman Archive Title: To Poets to Come
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00196
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman numbered the inscribed sides of the folded leaf, in pencil, in the upper right corners. Side 1 corresponds to verses 1-9 of section 14 of "Chants Democratic" in the 1860 Leaves of Grass; side 2 ("I expect that Kanadians,") became verses 10-16 of that version. In 1867 it was shortened to make up section 4 of the final "Leaves of Grass" cluster. In 1872 it was permanently retitled "Poets to Come" and transferred to the cluster "The Answerer," where it stayed until being moved to the "Inscriptions" cluster in 1881.


Points in Proem

Whitman Archive Title: Points in Proem
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00121
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: Points in Proem
Date:
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Notes on some material to incorporate into the "Proem" Whitman drafted in another manuscript.


Portals

Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 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
Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


Power, passions

Whitman Archive Title: [Power, passions, vehement joys]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00036
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Children of Adam. A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1850-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 26.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These lines have an unknown relationship to Whitman's published work.


Prairie States, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Prairie States
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00029
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Autumn Rivulets: The Prairie States
Date: about 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Signed manuscript, lightly revised, of the poem "The Prairie States," which was first published, in manuscript facsimile, in The Art Autograph in March 1880. It was later printed in the 1881–82 and later printings of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: The Prairie States
Whitman Archive ID: byu.00001
Repository: Brigham Young University: L. Tom Perry Special Collections
Repository ID: Vault MSS 356
Date: March 16, 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a late draft, probably for the printer, of "The Prairie States," which was first published in 1880. It is signed and dated March 16, 1880.


Prairie Sunset, A

Whitman Archive Title: A Prairie Sunset
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00167
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 79
Date: early 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14 cm x 21 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a draft of the poem titled "A Prairie Sunset" first published in the New York Herald, March 9, 1888. A note at the top states: "sent to Herald March 2" indicating the draft was likely completed around the time of publication.


Prairie-Grass Dividing, The

Whitman Archive Title: Prairie-Grass
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00326
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of pink paper (21 x 13 cm), in black ink, with revisions in an even blacker ink and in pencil. Pinholes in center. The poem was originally numbered 53. In 1860 Whitman designated it section 25 of "Calamus," transforming the title into a new first line and expanding the original first line into verses 2-4. In 1867 he further revised it, permanently retitling it "The Prairie-Grass Dividing."


Prairies and Great Plains in Poetry, The

Whitman Archive Title: [Chief Wapalingua]
Whitman Archive ID: pri.00024
Repository: Princeton University Library: Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
Date: 1879–1880
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: Several pages of notes most likely composed during Whitman's trip west in the fall of 1879. Portions of this manuscript were later used in "The Prairies and Great Plains in Poetry. (After traveling Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and Colorado.)," Specimen Days & Collect (1882). This prose piece appeared unchanged in Complete Prose (1892).


Prayer of Columbus

Whitman Archive Title: It is in itself
Whitman Archive ID: amh.00002
Repository: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Date: about 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is an early draft, with revisions, of the paragraph that introduced "Prayer of Columbus" when it was first published in the March 1874 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine and then in Two Rivulets (1876). Later printings of the poem deleted the introduction.



Whitman Archive Title: [Poem—Columbus]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00880
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). Marginalia.
Date: about May, 1869
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 41 x 27 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Detached from Irish Republic 3, no. 5 (May 1869), 60: "The Last Days of Columbus" [abstract from Sir Arthur Phelps' book The Spanish Conquest in America, reprinted from Harper's Magazine]. Across left margin in Walt Whitman's hand: "Poems—Columbus—(? that name for piece)—make the poem an utterance of Columbus—there on Jamaica island (read first Ulysses, by Tennyson)." Some of the passages in the abstract are marked and underlined by Whitman. This is assumed to be the original idea of the poem "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: [By me]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00267
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: [Thou knowest my]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00268
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: [what is the guidance]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00269
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: Columbus Prayer (ad 1503)
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00270
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes on the title of the poem that became "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: Columbus Prayers (ad 1503)
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00271
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874. On the verso is prose concerning "Nationality" and "Cohesion."



Whitman Archive Title: [A batter'd wreck'd old man]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00272
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874. The lines are written on stationery from the Attorney General's office and on the verso are prose notes, one of which reads "Acknowledge our obligations to English & other foreign literature."



Whitman Archive Title: [My hand, my limbs grow nerveless]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00273
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A heavily revised draft, written on two scraps pasted together, of lines for "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874. On the verso are prose notes beginning "Idea in each of the three papers." Whitman's intentions for these notes are unclear.



Whitman Archive Title: [Steersman unseen]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00274
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874. On the verso are prose notes beginning "Idea in each of the three papers."



Whitman Archive Title: [Be it with]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00275
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: [What may be the end I know not]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00276
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874. On the verso is a prose note reading "much of this stuff will come in the 'Notes.'"



Whitman Archive Title: [my end draws]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00277
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: [my brain grows rack'd]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00278
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: Pourtraiture of Columbus
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00279
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Prose notes concerning Whitman's idea for the poem "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: Pourtray Columbus
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00280
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Prose notes concerning Whitman's idea for the poem "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: [my altar here the bleak sea-sand]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00281
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: [what do I know of life?]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00282
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874. On the verso is a brief prose note mentioning "Lecturers—& their Style."



Whitman Archive Title: [Utter prostrate]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00283
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874. On the verso are Whitman's prose notes, now partially torn away, treating "Personal[ism]" and the Kalev[ala].



Whitman Archive Title: [The terminus now near]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00284
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: [I am too full of woe]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00285
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: [Thine now the helm]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00286
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: [All my emprises]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00287
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874.



Whitman Archive Title: [Haply the lifeless cross]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00288
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines from "Prayer of Columbus," first published in 1874. On the verso is prose about a "capacious class of mighty ministers of the mind."



Whitman Archive Title: [Again with latest breath]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00081
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Prayer of Columbus
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00266
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Prayer of Columbus (1874). A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Bound corrected proofs of "Prayer of Columbus," which was published first in 1874. The title page, which follows Whitman's portrait, reads "Prayer of Columbus, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof, 1881." The corrections are most likely for the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass.


Preface, 1855, to first issue of "Leaves of Grass"

Whitman Archive Title: Outdoors is the best antiseptic
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00297
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 32
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This prose fragment extols the virtues of outdoor living and the appeal of physical laborers who work outdoors. Similar ideas are found throughout Leaves of Grass. The following lines in the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself" echoes the first two sentences of this manuscript: "I am enamoured of growing outdoors, / Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, / Of the builders and steerers of ships, of the wielders of axes and mauls, of the drivers of horses" (1855, p. 21). The first part of this prose fragment also may relate to the following line from the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass: "The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people" (p. v). The transcription of the manuscript published in Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 152, includes additional text not now present in the manuscript that may also connect it to the following line in the poem eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric": "Do you think they are not there because they are not expressed in parlors and lecture-rooms?" (1855, p. 81). Edward Grier claims that this manuscript was, at one time, pinned together with another manuscript (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:169; see duk.00296).



Whitman Archive Title: Lofty sirs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00387
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 31
Folder: before 1855, "I Am a Born Democrat," draft
Date: Between 1840 and 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Edward Grier concludes that this manuscript was likely written before 1855 because of its similarity to several of the notebooks that Whitman wrote from that period (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2110). Ideas in this manuscript are similar to ideas in the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself," and lines and phrases from the manuscript appear in another manuscript that may have contributed to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself": see "I know many beautiful things" (tex.00031.html). The tone of the statements is also consistent with Whitman's early journalistic and editorial persona. Ideas and words from this manuscript are also similar to ideas and words that appeared in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. There is also a chance this manuscript relates to language in a Whitman-authored review of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, titled "Walt Whitman and His Poems," originally published in the United States Review. An image of the reverse of this manuscript is currently unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Poem incarnating the mind
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00346
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Not to Dazzle
Whitman Archive ID: med.00729
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown,
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Lines from this manuscript were used in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The sentence that begins "The soul has that measureless pride..." also later became part of the poem "Song of Prudence." Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances of its composition, but it was probably written before or early in 1855.



Whitman Archive Title: No doubt the efflux of the soul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00025
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Undated Thoughts, Ideas, and Trial lines (3 V.)
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: This notebook consists almost entirely of prose. However, the ideas and language developed throughout the notebook can be linked to a number of poems that appeared in Leaves of Grass, including "Song of Myself," "Great are the Myths" (ultimately shortened to a few lines and titled "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night"), "Faces," "The Sleepers," and "To Think of Time," versions of which appeared in Leaves of Grass in 1855. One manuscript passage is similar to a passage in the preface to the 1855 edition. Thus, this notebook was almost certainly written before that date. Content from the first several paragraphs of this notebook was also used slightly revised in "Song of the Open Road," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves as "Poem of the Road."



Whitman Archive Title: American literature must become distinct
Whitman Archive ID: rut.00010
Repository: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey: Special Collections and University Archives
Repository ID: Ac.605
Date: Between 1845 and 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript includes ideas similar to those found in the 1855 prose preface to Leaves of Grass, suggesting that the date is likely before or early in 1855. Floyd Stovall suggests that some of Whitman's ideas in this manuscript came from an article entitled "Thoughts on Reading" that appeared in the American Whig Review in May 1845 ("Notes on Whitman's Reading," American Literature 26.3 [November 1954]: 352). The manuscript is held at Rutgers University Library along with several similar manuscripts that are numbered sequentially and probably date from around or before 1855: see "dithyrambic trochee" (rut.00022), "The only way in which" (rut.00023), "The money value of real" (rut.00024), and "ground where you may rest" (rut.00025).



Whitman Archive Title: And to me each minute
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00057
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Song of Myself
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript includes lines that relate to the prose preface and to several of the poems in that edition, including the poems eventually titled "Song of Myself," "To Think of Time," and "A Song for Occupations." The manuscript also includes lines that relate to the manuscript poem "Pictures,"" which probably dates to the mid- to late 1850s. Notes about the arrangement and production of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass are written on the back of this manuscript.



Whitman Archive Title: Man, before the rage of
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00287
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Before 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Although they are written in free verse, both the conventional nature of these lines and the handwriting suggest an early date of inscription. This draft may be a continuation of duk.00018 ("There is no word in"), suggesting it may relate to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." The lines, especially the first and third, also bear some resemblance to a passage of the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and to lines in what eventually became section 6 of "I Sing the Body Electric."



Whitman Archive Title: One obligation of great fresh
Whitman Archive ID: med.00737
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances or date of its composition. The discussion of "the poetic quality" and the punctuation (at least as rendered by earlier editors) are similar to the preface to the 18555 Leaves of Grass, so it is possible that the composition date was before or early in 1855..



Whitman Archive Title: For example, whisper
Whitman Archive ID: med.00726
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Because this manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances or date of its composition, but based on the content it seems likely that it was written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was composing his first edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript note about the "superb wonder of a blade of grass" may relate to similar statements in the prose preface and the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." In Notes and Fragments, Richard Maurice Bucke transcribes the manuscript with "Enter into the thoughts of" (nyp.00112) and describes it as "a very early note, the paper torn and almost falling to pieces." The date of the manuscript is almost certainly before 1855.



Whitman Archive Title: The only way in which
Whitman Archive ID: rut.00023
Repository: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey: Special Collections and University Archives
Repository ID: Ac.605
Date: Between 1845 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Edward Grier suggests that this manuscript was probably written prior to 1860, noting some similarities in language and sentiment between it and the initial line of No. 4 of the "Thoughts" cluster published first in the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:118). The erased final line of the manuscript is also similar to language that appears in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. The manuscript is held at Rutgers University Library along with several similar manuscripts that are numbered sequentially and probably date from around or before 1855: see "American literature must become distinct (rut.00010)," "dithyrambic trochee" (rut.00022), "The money value of real" (rut.00024), and "ground where you may rest" (rut.00025).



Whitman Archive Title: Talbot Wilson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00141
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: It seems to me
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00302
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 33
Date: Between 1847 and 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Note expressing an admonition to avoid similes and ornament in poetry, possibly related to passages in the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, which express similar sentiments. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "What shall the great poet be then?," "The most superb beauties," and "Make no quotations."



Whitman Archive Title: I see who you are
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00263
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 8
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines, cancelled with a vertical strike, that appeared in the second poem of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "A Song for Occupations." The phrase "driver(s) of horses," a version of which appears in text added to a transcription of this manuscript in Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 31, appears in both the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and appears in its first poem, eventually titled "Song of Myself." On the reverse is one heavily corrected line whose relationship to the recto material or to any other published poem is uncertain.



Whitman Archive Title: Rules for Composition
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00130
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 136
Date: Early 1850s
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: In this manuscript (likely from the early 1850s), Whitman describes his views on style and composition. His comments about the importance of a lack of "ornament" in literature are similar to lines from the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman reworked some of those ideas on ornament and they appeared in the poem "Says" in the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves. The poem was later retitled "Suggestions" and was retained in Leaves until 1872 but thereafter was excluded.



Whitman Archive Title: It is the endless delusion
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00800
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 6
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This prose manuscript includes a thought similar to one from the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." Whitman writes that "The noble soul steadily rejects any liberty or privilege or wealth that is not open on the same terms to every other man and every other woman." This idea is phrased more memorably in the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass—"By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms" (29)—suggesting a date for the manuscript of 1855 or earlier. Other ideas and words from this manuscript are similar to ideas and words that appeared in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. See, for instance, the line: "the melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to the toss and pallor of years of moneymaking with all their scorching days and icy nights and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or infinitessimals of parlors, or shameless stuffing while others starve . . " (1855, p. x). The reverse (duk.00261) contains ideas and language related to what eventually became section 41 of "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: steamboats and vaccination
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00888
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: Preliminary Studies for Poems
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript includes words and ideas similar to those that appear in the prose preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. Edward Grier notes that the "date is probably before or early in 1855" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:177). On the reverse is another prose fragment (duk.00293) that appears to be related to lines from what would later become "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: The genuine miracles of Christ
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01019
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "The Genuine Miracles of Christ," draft
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This cancelled prose manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855. Language in the manuscript was used in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." Segments of the manuscript also resemble language that appeared in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and in the 1856 "Poem of Perfect Miracles," later titled "Miracles." The wording of "the vast elemental sympathy, which, only the human soul is capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods," was used, slightly revised, in "A Song of Joys," which first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as "Poem of Joys."



Whitman Archive Title: In his presence
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00483
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: Between 1850 and 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: Whitman probably inscribed the material in this notebook in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Some of Whitman's language about the poet and religion in this notebook is similar to the language and ideas used in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Content from leaf 10 verso (see twentieth image) was revised and used in "The Sleepers," the poem eventually titled "The Sleepers," which first appeared in Leaves of Grass (1855), including the following lines: "Now the vast dusk bulk that is the whale's bulk . . . . it seems mine, / Warily, sportsman! though I lie so sleepy and sluggish, my tap is death" (1855, p. 74). The passage likely also relates to the following lines in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself": "How the flukes splash! / How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!" (1855, p. 48). Content from leaf 13 recto (see twenty-fifth image) may relate to other sections of the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: Do you know what music
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00088
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 4
Repository Title: An Essay on the Soul
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was preparing material for his first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. A portion of the first paragraph of the manuscript, dealing with music and its relationship to the soul, is similar to a passage in the poem eventually titled "A Song For Occupations." Other language in the manuscript is similar to the prose preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and to lines from the poems that would eventually be titled "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric."



Whitman Archive Title: I know many beautiful things
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00031
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript between 1850 and 1855, as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Ideas and phrases from the manuscript appear in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." This manuscript also includes lines and phrases that appear in other manuscripts. See loc.00387 ("Lofty sirs") and loc.00163 ("Rule in all addresses").



Whitman Archive Title: I am a Student
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00238
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 9.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines in the manuscript are similar to sentences used in the preface to that edition. Ideas expressed in the manuscript also relate loosely to lines in the first poem in the 1855 edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." Lines written on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00570 appeared in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: The new theologies bring forward
Whitman Archive ID: med.00746
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: This manuscript, known only from a transcription published by Clifton Joseph Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts (Harvard University Press, 1928), 43, includes lines that appeared, in a slightly altered form, in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and later in the poem eventually titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves as "Poem of Many in One." The date of the manuscript is therefore probably before or early in 1855.



Whitman Archive Title: Why need genius and the
Whitman Archive ID: med.00741
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: About 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: The content of this manuscript, which is known only from a transcription published by Richard Maurice Bucke in Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 103, appeared in slightly revised form in the prose preface to the 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass. The date of composition is therefore probably just before 1855.



Whitman Archive Title: I want no more of
Whitman Archive ID: med.00782
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: The language and ideas in this manuscript are reminiscent of phrases and ideas Whitman used in the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, suggesting that this manuscript was composed before or early in 1855. Compare, in particular, the following passages from that edition: "the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors" (p. iii); "the President's taking off his hat to them not they to him" (p. iii); and "take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men" (p. vi). The manuscript has not been located and is known only from a transcription in Walt Whitman's Workshop, ed. Clifton J. Furness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 55.



Whitman Archive Title: I tell you greedy smoucher
Whitman Archive ID: med.00903
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: The language in this manuscript is similar to the following line from the poem that would eventually be titled "Song of Myself": "By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms" (1855, p. 29). Ideas and words from this manuscript are also similar to ideas and words that appeared in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. See, for instance, the line: "the melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to the toss and pallor of years of moneymaking with all their scorching days and icy nights and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or infinitessimals of parlors, or shameless stuffing while others starve . . " (1855, p. x). Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances of its composition, but it is possible that it was written in the early 1850s as Whitman was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. In his transcription of the manuscript, Richard Maurice Bucke paired it with another manuscript, "Remember that the clock and" (duk.00298).



Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Existence
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00060
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 26
Date: Between 1850 and 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript of poetic lines unpublished in Whitman's lifetime. Resemblances to passages in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass are perhaps evidence that these notes constitute draft material for that edition. Another possibility is that these notes represent an attempt to recast ideas from the preface into poetry—a process that Whitman used successfully to create several new poems for the second edition of 1856. The note at the top of the manuscript lends credence to the second theory, as it follows the characteristic title structure unique to the second edition, although Whitman never published a poem under the title "Poem of Existence."



Whitman Archive Title: (Of the great poet)
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00128
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 69
Date: About 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: This manuscript includes notes that anticipate the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Images and phrases in the second paragraph of the first leaf are reminscent of lines in both the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself" and the poem eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric." Another line on the first leaf appeared in a slightly different form in "Poem of The Singers, and of The Words of Poems" in the 1856 edition of Leaves (a poem later titled "Song of the Answerer"). The stated desire for "satisfiers" and "lovers" (found here on the bottom of the second leaf) appears in "Poem of Many in One," also first published in the 1856 edition and later titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore."



Whitman Archive Title: Rule in all addresses
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00163
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, Rule in All Addresses.
Date: Before 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Lines and phrases on both the recto and verso of this manuscript contributed to portions of the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself," and possibly to other sections of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, suggesting a composition date before 1855. However, this manuscript also includes lines that probably contributed to "Sun-Down Poem" (later retitled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry") in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. It is possible that some of these poetic lines contributed to the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. A line in this manuscript is similar to the following line, in the poem later titled "Song of Myself": "I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself" (1855, p. 17). Another line is similar to the lines "And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's-self is" (1855, p. 53) and "And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man" (1855, p. 26). Another manuscript line is similar to the line "Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man" (1855, p. 23). And several manuscript lines are similar to the lines beginning "Not merely of the New World but of Africa Europe or Asia . . . . a wandering savage, / A farmer, mechanic, or artist . . . . a gentleman, sailor, lover or quaker, / A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician or priest" (1855, p. 24). Three other lines are similar to: "Storming enjoying planning loving cautioning, / Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, / I tread day and night such roads" (1855, p. 38). Edward Grier speculates that Whitman's note "Don't forget the bombardment" relates to the "bombardment" of the "old artillerist" in "Song of Myself": "I am an old artillerist, and tell of some fort's bombardment . . . . and am there again" (1855, p. 40). (See Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:165). Several phrases of the prose on the verso were probably later used, in somewhat revised form, in the following lines from "Sun-down Poem" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass: "The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious, / My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Would not people laugh at me?" (1856, p. 216). The poem was later titled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." It is possible that some of the poetic lines on the verso contributed to the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines "I am too great to be a mere President or Major General / I remain with my fellows—with mechanics, and farmers and common people" may relate to the sentence from the preface that reads: "Other states indicate themselves in their deputies....but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors...but always most in the common people" (1855, p. iii). The line "I remain with them all on equal terms" may also be related to the following line in the preface: "The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms" (1855, p. vii). The line "In me are the old and young the fool and the wise thinker" may be related to a similar phrase in the poem eventually titled "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?": "The stupid and the wise thinker" (1855, p. 92). The phrase "mother of many children" appears in both the preface and in the poem later titled "Faces."



Whitman Archive Title: I say that Democracy
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05314
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: What shall the great poet be then?
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00303
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 33
Date: 1850s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Note about "the great poet" that possibly contributed to a passage in the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in which Whitman writes that the "swarms of the polished deprecating and reflectors and the polite float off and leave no remembrance" (1855, p. xii). This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "It seems to me," "The most superb beauties," and "Make no quotations."



Whitman Archive Title: [after all]
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00001
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 50
Date: between about 1855 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is written on a green sheet used for the endpapers of the first edition of the Leaves of Grass (1855), an edition that begins with a ten-page statement in prose, originally untitled and later known generally as the 1855 Preface. This manuscript seems to represent an early attempt by Whitman to recast the 1855 prose Preface into poetry. The 1860–61 edition of Leaves of Grass introduced two new poems created in this way: "Poem of Many in One" (later "By Blue Ontario's Shore") and "Poem of the Last Explanation of Prudence" (later "Song of Prudence"). Neither of the published poems incorporates lines from this manuscript, though it and "Song of Prudence" are drawn from adjacent portions of the 1855 Preface.



Whitman Archive Title: [A little sum laid aside for burial money—a few clapboards around]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00248
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 17 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a poetic rendition of a long sentence in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The prose sentence begins, "Beyond the independence of a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a few clapboards around..."



Whitman Archive Title: you woman, mother of children
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00137
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 24.5 cm x 24.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript may have been written in the early 1850s, as Whitman was preparing material for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The language and imagery in the manuscript are similar to language and imagery used in the preface to that edition and in the first poem, eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: [Let others say what they]
Whitman Archive ID: med.00783
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: about 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: This one-sentence manuscript, expressing the opinion that "all the military and naval personnel of the States must conform to the sternest principles of Dem[ocracy]," is known only from a transcription published by Richard Maurice Bucke in Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 55. The sentiment and phrasing of the manuscript are similar to statements Whitman made in "Democracy," an essay first published in the December 1867 issue of The Galaxy. When in 1871, Whitman combined this and two other essays to form the pamphlet-length essay Democratic Vistas, he elaborated the point with a note declaring "the whole present system of officering [. . .] a monstrous exotic." It is also possible that the present manuscript represents a draft fragment that contributed the "Preface" to the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), which contains a passing reference to the belief that no "detail of the army or navy [. . .] can long elude the [. . .] instinct of American standards."



Whitman Archive Title: Sanity and ensemble characterise
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00005
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 57
Date: 1855 or 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Most of the lines in this manuscript amount to a poetic rendering of sentences and phrases drawn from the prose preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and constitute a partial draft of the 1856 poem "Poem of Many In One," which eventually became "By Blue Ontario's Shore." The line at the bottom of this manuscript, partially cut away, was also drawn from the 1855 preface but was used in the 1856 poem "Liberty Poem for Asia, Africa, Europe, America, Australia, Cuba, and the Archipelagoes of The Sea," which Whitman titled, in its final version, "To a Foil'd European Revolutionaire." Draft lines on the back of this manuscript (upa.00221) also relate to the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: [med Cophósis]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00005
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, Before 1855, Women
Date: Between 1852 and 1854
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These pages were written by Whitman in the early to mid-1850s. William White described the pages as "torn from a tall notebook" (Daybooks and Notebooks [New York: New York University Press, 1978], 773–777). White noted a relationship between these pages and the poems "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Song of the Answerer," and "There Was a Child Went Forth." Some of the ideas and language being worked out here also appear in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." For a discussion of the dating and importance of this notebook, see Matt Miller, Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 11–16.



Whitman Archive Title: The idea of reconciliation
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05180
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: I know a rich capitalist
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00129
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
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
Content: Emory Holloway has pointed out that Whitman's reference to the sinking of the San Francisco indicates that this notebook, "or at least part of it, is later than 1853." He writes that "it was probably begun in 1854" because the "marble church" in the first passage presumably refers to the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, "which was not completed until then." See Holloway, "A Whitman Manuscript," American Mercury 3 (December 1924), 475–480. See also Andrew C. Higgins, "Art and Argument: The Rise of Walt Whitman's Rhetorical Poetics, 1838-1855," PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1999; and Edward F. Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:128–135. Of the notebook passages that can be identified with published works, most represent early versions of images and phrases from the 1855 poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." One passage clearly contributed to the 1856 poem later titled "Song of the Open Road." Others are possibly connected to the poems eventually titled "A Song for Occupations" and "Great Are the Myths," both first published in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and to the preface for that volume. One passage seems to have contributed to the 1860–1861 poem that Whitman later titled "Our Old Feuillage." One passage is similar to a line in a long manuscript poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures". The first several lines of that poem (not including the line in question) were revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880 and then in Leaves of Grass as part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster (1881–1882, p. 310). No image of the outside back cover of the notebook is available because it has been stitched into a larger volume.



Whitman Archive Title: A cluster of poems
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00086
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 19
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: About 1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19.5 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains notes for a cluster of poems that Whitman characterizes as being "in the same way as 'Calamus Leaves' expressing the idea and sentiment of Happiness . . . " Whitman's use of the title "Calamus Leaves" on the opposite side, as in some very similar notes currently housed at Duke University, point toward the 1860 cluster "Enfans d'Adam" and dates the notes to some point in the late spring of 1859. On the reverse side of the leaf (uva.00516) are lines that perhaps constitute early notes for the second poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, a poem that would eventually be titled "A Song for Occupations."



Whitman Archive Title: In Future Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: med.00784
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: 1855–1871
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Notes on a future edition of Leaves of Grass in which Whitman insists that the "divine style" is one without ornament. In the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes about literary ornaments, concluding that "most works are most beautiful without ornament." Whitman reworked some of these ideas on ornament and they appear in the poem, "Suggestions," which initially appeared in Leaves of Grass (1860) as "Says." This poem was retained in Leaves of Grass until 1872 and thereafter was excluded. This manuscript is known only from a transcription published by Richard Maurice Bucke in Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 69.



Whitman Archive Title: Understand that you can have
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00138
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Repository Title: ["Understand that you can have in your writing..."]
Date: 1855 or 1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Although no specific lines from this manuscript can be directly tied to any of Whitman's published work, the language and ideas are similar to certain sections of the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, as well as to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself," suggesting that this manuscript may have been written around that time. Wording in this manuscript is also similar to a line in the 1855 poem eventually titled "To Think of Time." A note written by Richard Maurice Bucke, one of Whitman's literary executors, dates the manuscript to 1855 or 1856 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:222).



Whitman Archive Title: The idea that in the
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00389
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 32
Folder: "Ideas of Punishment-Reward, Woman, Liberty," draft
Date: Between 1854 and 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is written on the back of a City of Williamsburgh tax form. A later note, in Whitman's hand, claims that the manuscript was written in 1855. It is possible that one of the lines relates to the following segment from the prose preface of the 1855 Leaves of Grass: "the perfect equality of the female with the male . . . ." (1855, p. iv). 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" [loc.05354.html]), but as Edward Grier points out, this 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. This manuscript is thus difficult to date conclusively, but it was almost certainly written after 1854 and probably before 1860. Based on a transcription of the manuscript in Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden, the later note about the date of the manuscript must have been added before September 1888 ([New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1915], 246).



Whitman Archive Title: paths of rhyme
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05618
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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-.


Preface, 1872, to "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free"

Whitman Archive Title: [Already as I write]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00242
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: between 1872 and 1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript, heavily revised, made from four scraps of paper. Two of the scraps (the second and fourth) were inscribed before being cut apart to insert the material on the third scrap. This manuscript probably represents Whitman's reworking of a passage from the "Preface" of As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free. And Other Poems (1872), which was reprinted as Preface, 1872, to "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free," (now "Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood," in permanent ed'n.) in Two Rivulets (1876), Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), and Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman revised the passage for use in "The War, though with two sides, really ONE IDENTITY (as struggles, furious conflicts of Nature, for final harmony.)—The Soil it bred and ripen'd from—the North as responsible for it as the South," which appeared in the "Notes" section of Memoranda During the War (1875–1876). This piece was also reprinted in Two Rivulets (1876).


Preface, 1876, to L. of G. and "Two Rivulets," Centennial Edition

Whitman Archive Title: In those Leaves
Whitman Archive ID: sal.00005
Repository: Salisbury House and Gardens, Des Moines, Iowa
Repository ID: 2010.9.261.a-b
Date: about 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft fragment of Whitman's "Preface, 1876, to the two-volume Centennial Edition of L. of G. and 'Two Rivulets,'" originally published in Two Rivulets (1876). Whitman included this preface in his Complete Prose Works (1892). This manuscript draft is comprised of three scraps of paper pasted together to make one leaf. On the verso of one of these scraps is a note Whitman made regarding his deteriorating health, which bears no discernible connection to Whitman's published works. This manuscript is catalogued with an envelope addressed to Herbert Gilchrist, postmarked 28 January 189[1].



Whitman Archive Title: [L. of G.]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00462
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 3
Repository Title: Nevertheless it must be distinctly admitted…
Date: about 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These fragmentary notes were probably written as Whitman drafted the preface for the publication in 1876 of Leaves of Grass and Two Rivulets as a two-volume set. The preface was reprinted in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) under the title "Preface, 1876, to L. of G. and 'Two Rivulets,' Centennial Edition." The notes on the reverse side, tex.00098, are probably related to the essay "Emerson's Books, (The Shadows of Them.)"



Whitman Archive Title: 2d Preface to As a Strong Bird
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00003
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository Title: Second preface to 'As a strong bird': autograph manuscript
Repository ID: MA 4500
Date: about 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A brief prose note headed "2d Preface to As a Strong Bird." On June 26, 1872, Whitman presented the poem "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free" for the Dartmouth College commencement, and it appeared in print that same date in both the New York Herald and the Washington Evening Post. Whitman published it later that year as the title poem in a small book, As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free: and Other Poems (1872). The title was later revised to "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood" when it was included in Leaves of Grass in 1881–1882. Though this prose draft may have been intended as a second preface to the poem before its title revision in 1881, portions of this manuscript were first used in an essay titled, "Preface," which appeared at the beginning of Two Rivulets, the second volume of the "Centennial Edition" of Leaves of Grass (1876). The title was later changed to "Preface, 1876, to the two-volume Centennial Edition of L. of G. and 'Two Rivulets.'" In the top left corner Whitman has written "Waves in the Vessel's Wake," a title that was used in manuscript for the poem published first as "In the Wake Following" in 1874 and as "After the Sea-Ship" in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Two Rivulets
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00072
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 14
Repository Title: Two Rivulets
Repository ID: #3829
Date: 1875-1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript is a draft of the "Preface" to Two Rivulets, published in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: [other than merely literary points]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00117
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 8
Date: 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A heavily revised draft fragment, composed of several scraps of paper pasted together to form two leaves. The notes found on the first leaf were used in "Preface, 1876, to the two-volume Centennial Edition of L. of G. and 'Two Rivulets'" (1876). The prose fragment on the second leaf contributed to "Darwinism—(then Furthermore)," a short prose piece that orginally appeared in Two Rivulets (1876), but that was later incorporated into the "Notes Left Over" section of Collect in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83). Both of these pieces were eventually included in Complete Prose Works (1892). Cancelled Civil War "reminiscences" on the Battle of First Fredericksburgh and the sinking of the U.S.S. Hatteras appear on the verso of the second leaf. Whitman wrote about both of these events in "'Tis But Ten Years Since (Third Paper)," New York Weekly Graphic (14 February 1874).


Preface to a Volume of Essays and Tales by Wm. D. O'Connor, Pub'd Posthumously in 1891

Whitman Archive Title: Copy of the OConnor preface
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00322
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 115
Date: 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 16 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A copy of Whitman's "Preface to a volume of essays and tales by Wm. JD. O'Connor, pub'd posthumously in 1891," which appeared in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891), and in William Douglas O'Connor's Three Tales (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Preface
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00323
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 115
Date: 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A corrected galley proof of Whitman's Preface to William Douglas O'Connor's Three Tales (1892). Whitman included this preface in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) as "Preface to a volume of essays and tales by Wm. JD. O'Connor, pub'd posthumously in 1891."


Prefatory Letter to the Reader

Whitman Archive Title: [To-day completes my three-score-and]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04657
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: 1889
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Printer's copy of the "Prefatory Letter to the Reader" that appeared in the 1889 printing of Leaves of Grass as an introduction to the essay "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads." This letter was omitted in the so-called "deathbed edition" of 1891–92.


[principal personages of the]

Whitman Archive Title: principal personages of the
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07417
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Prisoners, The

Whitman Archive Title: The policy of the War Department in not exchanging prisoners
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00930
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 32
Folder: ca. 1864, "The Policy of the War Department in Not Exchanging Prisoners"
Date: 1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A short draft on the exchange of the prisoners of war, the last paragraph of which was revised and printed on 27 December 1864 in both "The Prisoners" New-York Times and "What Stops the General Exchange of Prisoners of War?—Three-fourths of Our Men Already Exchanged by Death, or Mental and Bodily Ruin, and the Rest will Soon Follow" Brooklyn Daily Eagle.


probably the largest known

Whitman Archive Title: 'Probably the largest Known animal'
Whitman Archive ID: amh.00005
Repository: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Date: 1872–1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These notes by Whitman, beginning "probably the largest known animal," concern a "rorqual," a "razorback" or "finback" whale. The relationship of these notes to Whitman's published work is unknown.


procession without halt, A

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Poets (now) in all lands
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00269
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript with notes for a poem to describe "the poetical sentiments in all lands," of which the connection to Whitman's published work is unknown. This fragment has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Poem (bequeathing to others a charge) what poems are wanted."



Whitman Archive Title: A procession without halt
Whitman Archive ID: owu.00001
Repository: Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware OH: The Bayley-Whitman Collection
Box: 3
Folder: 12
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The date is unknown. Whitman used the image of a procession many times in his poetry, including in section 38 of "Song of Myself" and in section 6 of "Return of the Heroes" (in the final versions of those poems). However, this manuscript is most likely a draft toward a different poem altogether. It is possible these lines were composed between 1861 and 1870, when Whitman had most reason to employ imagery of marching.


Proem

Whitman Archive Title: Proem
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00118
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: Proem
Date:
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Draft of a line justifying the poet's inclusion of "amativeness" as a topic in his poems. The title "Proem" suggests that this may be the draft of a passage for a prefatory poem.


Progenitors

Whitman Archive Title: Progenitors
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00207
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: Progenitors (Autograph MS)
Date: 1850s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript about Whitman's ancestors on his mother's side. Based on the paper and the handwriting, which he compares to that of Whitman's early notebooks, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:13).


Promise to California, A

Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [A promise to Indiana]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00318
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 22 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of pink paper (22 x 13 cm), in black ink, with revisions in the same ink. Pinholes mostly in center. The original title was "Leaflet," and the original number seems to have been 70. After substantial revision (including the addition of the new first line "A promise and gift to California,") this poem became section 30 of "Calamus" in 1860. Whitman further revised the poem before including it, permanently retitled "A Promise to California," in the 1867 Leaves.


Proud Music of the Storm

Whitman Archive Title: Address Book
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02821
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Proud music of the Storm
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00046
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 23
Date: Mid- to late 1860s
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Correction notes and potential extra lines for the poem "Proud Music of the Storm," first published in The Atlantic Monthly (February 1869) as "Proud Music of the Sea-Storm." Subsequently, the poem was titled "Proud Music of the Storm" in Passage to India (1871), Two Rivulets (1876), and in Leaves of Grass (1881-1882). On the reverse of the manuscript is the beginning of a letter on Attorney General's Office stationery.



Whitman Archive Title: Theme for piece
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00045
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 22
Date: about 1869
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An outline for a poem on various types of music, potentially related to "Proud Music of the Storm" and/or "The Mystic Trumpeter." The poem "The Mystic Trumpeter" was first published in The Kansas Magazine of February 1872. "Proud Music of the Storm" was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1869. The reverse contains cancelled notes about a stanza to describe a triumphal instrumental and vocal chorus corresponding to that of man triumphing over temptation and weakness.



Whitman Archive Title: Proud music of the Sea-storm
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00063
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: bv10
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Proud Music of the Sea-Storm
Date: about 1869
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 9 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18
Content: Printer's copy of "Proud Music of the Sea-Storm," published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1869. In subsequent printings, the title was altered to "Proud Music of the Storm."



Whitman Archive Title: Proud Music of the Sea-Storm
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00102
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Repository Title: Proud Music of the Sea-Storm
Date: 1869
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, folio proof
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Folio proof of "Proud Music of the Sea-Storm" with the handwritten annotation "Atlantic Monthly, February."


Proudly the Flood Comes In

Whitman Archive Title: [Nor you and trail of yours]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04156
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Proudly the flood comes in]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04170
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [The land itself]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04163
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Mainsails and topsails]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04177
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [worldly and gaily comes]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05104
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Proudly the flood comes in
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00052
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a draft of "Proudly the Flood Comes In," published as part of "Fancies at Navesink" in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. The reverse of this manuscript is an advertisement for Whitman's book, Drum-Taps. This manuscript is bound with others under the title "Fancies at Navesink."


pure water

Whitman Archive Title: [Pure water]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00015
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 16 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Below the trial verses, separated from them by a diagonal pencil stroke, appears a cartoon hand pointing to the annotation "I must have/ Poem[.]"


Queries to My Seventieth Year

Whitman Archive Title: My Seventieth Year
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00217
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: My 70th Year (1888). A. MS. draft.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of a poem later revised and published under the title "Queries to My Seventieth Year" in 1888.



Whitman Archive Title: [Here fretful]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00014
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Queries to My 70th Year (1888). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 23 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: One page draft written in pencil on a sheet of coarse paper, with a notation in another hand at the very bottom ("297—Doubleday Queries to 70th Year"). The lines were revised and published as "Queries to My Seventieth Year" in 1888.



Whitman Archive Title: Queries To My Seventieth Year
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00011
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: To my seventieth year
Repository ID: HM 11207
Date: 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily revised draft, signed, of "Queries to My Seventieth Year," a poem first published in the May 2, 1888 issue of the New York Herald. It was reprinted in November Boughs (1888) and included in the "Sands at Seventy" annex of Leaves of Grass (1891–92).


questions involved is curious, The

Whitman Archive Title: The questions involved is curious
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00451
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Repository Title: The questions involved is are curious to discuss
Date: Between 1840 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript deals with "Poetry fit for the New World," an idea Whitman pondered from the earliest stages of his poetic career. Edward Grier notes that the "handwriting and subject matter suggest an early date" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1589).


Quicksand Years

Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman. 1862.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00026
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, handwritten
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Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


Quintette, A

Whitman Archive Title: [curiously writes itself]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01077
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "Twilight Whisperings," draft
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: These manuscript pages reflect Whitman's experiences visiting the sick in hospitals in Washington during "the Secession War." Two lines from this manuscript, "At vacancy with Nature / Acceptive and at ease," were used as part of the poem Whitman presents in, "A Quintette," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) before being collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Railroad poem

Whitman Archive Title: [Railroad poem]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00147
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: Literary, Undated, Railroad Poem
Date: undated
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes for several ideas for poems, including the railroad, mines, "corn and meat," and "the Man's hand and the Woman's hand." At the bottom is a longer prose note describing Whitman's goals for a large work about the American West.


Real American Red Men

Whitman Archive Title: Real American Red Men
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00324
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 116
Date: 1870–1872
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of a prose piece which appeared in the 20 September 1872 issue of the Washington Evening Star, under the head "Washington News and Gossip." For more on this manuscript and its historical context, see Martin Murray, "The Poet-Chief Greets the Sioux," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 17 (Summer 1999), 25-37.


Real War will never get in the Books, The

Whitman Archive Title: [There seems to be quite]
Whitman Archive ID: uri.00001
Repository: University of Rhode Island: Special Collections and University Archives, Robert L. Carothers Library
Repository Title: Walt Whitman's Drum Taps
Repository ID: PS3211 A1 1865
Date: 1865–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A prose manuscript fragment tipped in a first edition copy of Drum Taps (1865). Though no lines from this manuscript can be traced directly to Whitman's published prose, this fragment shares a strong thematic connection with "The Real War will never get in the Books," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883).



Whitman Archive Title: [The bivouac does not the voice of]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00461
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Date: between 1865 and 1883
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two lines of verse, with revisions. The relation of these lines to Whitman's published poetry is uncertain, though in concept and imagery they echo a passage from "The Real War will never get in the Books," a prose piece that appeared in Specimen Days (1882–83). There, the poet writes that the war was not a quadrille in a ball-room. The lines on the other side of the leaf, tex.00012, are for the Drum-Taps (1865) poem "A March in the Ranks Hard-Pressed, and the Road Unknown."


Recorders Ages Hence

Whitman Archive Title: In a poem make the
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00278
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: before 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Note for a poem to address the question "What will be the result of this years hence?" The note is possibly related to the poem "Recorders Ages Hence," first published in Leaves of Grass (1860) as "Calamus 10," and taking its final title in 1867. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "And there," "'The Scout'," and "Drops of my Blood."


regular time for baking, The

Whitman Archive Title: The regular time
Whitman Archive ID: med.00731
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Between 1840 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: A very short manuscript, known only from a transcription in Notes & Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 122. Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances or date of its composition, but based on other manuscript transcriptions that Richard Maurice Bucke printed with this manuscript, Edward Grier infers that the composition date is likely the 1840s or 1850s.


Rel.—I remember also that

Whitman Archive Title: Rel.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00170
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: Literary, Undated, Religion
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Two leaves of notes entitled "Rel." and discussing issues related to religion. A note in another hand in the top margin declares that the note is from before the Civil War.


Remember in Scientific

Whitman Archive Title: Remember in Scientific
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00300
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 33
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two reminders about general principles Whitman had decided upon for future poems. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "a volume."


remembrance, A

Whitman Archive Title: A remembrance
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00117
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: (A remembrance)
Date:
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A heavily revised line toward what seems to have been intended as a poem titled "A remembrance," honoring the air we breathe and also "a breed of full-sized young men and women."


Return of a Brooklyn Veteran

Whitman Archive Title: [some interesting items of 51st]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00185
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 57
Date: 1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 16 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
Content: A notebook on the 51st New York Veterans in which Whitman recorded notes on George W. Whitman and other soldiers in that regiment, including their involvement in the war and snippets of biographical information. While significant passages from this notebook cannot be found verbatim in Whitman's published work, it is clear that these notes contributed to Whitman's Civil War writings, including "Fifty-first New-York City Veterans," New-York Times, 29 October 1864; "Fifty-first New-York Volunteers," New-York Times, 24 January 1865; and "Return of a Brooklyn Veteran," Brooklyn Daily Union, 16 March 1865.


Return of the Heroes, The

Whitman Archive Title: Of this broad and majestic
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00549
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two phrases and images from this manuscript appear, slightly altered, in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that would later be titled "Song of Myself." The manuscript was therefore probably written before or early in 1855. In the manuscript Whitman has added the phrase "the timothy and the clover" to a description of plants growing in a field. On page 18 of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass Whitman describes jumping from the crossbeams of a barn into the hay and says he will "seize the clover and timothy." Later in the manuscript he writes of "the buckwheat and its white tops and the bees that hum there all day," and on page 36 of the 1855 Leaves he writes of the "white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and a buzzer there with the rest." A similar line concerning buckwheat and bees appeared in the poem "Come Up From the Fields Father," and a reference to "clover and timothy" appeared in "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun." Both poems were first published in Drum-Taps in 1865. "Clover and timothy" also appears in the poem "The Return of the Heroes," which was first published in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. On the reverse of this manuscript (nyp.00085) are poetic lines, one of which appeared in the poem ultimately titled "I Sing the Body Electric."



Whitman Archive Title: A Carol of Harvest, for 1867
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00129
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 14
Repository ID: #3829
Date: 1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 29 leaves, 19.5 x 12.5, handwritten
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Content: The poem "A Carol of Harvest for 1867" was published first in The Galaxy, September 1867, and reprinted one month later in Tinsely's Magazine (London). A revised version of the poem was added to Passage to India (1871). The 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass includes a further revised version entitled "The Return of the Heroes." These manuscript pages were likely revised prior to the poem's first publication.


Revenge and Requital

Whitman Archive Title: Nehemiah Whitman
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00556
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: A Family Record. Composed and written by Walt Whitman.
Date: Between 1845 and 1861
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript consists of notes about Whitman's family history. The various dates referenced suggest that the earliest portions of it were written sometime after 1845, and most of the notes seem to have been written at various stages between 1845 and 1855. Edward Grier dates the recto to 1850, and speculates that the earliest date for the writing on the verso is likely March 1853, when the two Cumberland Street houses were sold (Notebooks and Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:8). For footnotes relating the names listed here to Whitman, see Grier. Whitman made additions to the manuscript several times, adding to it for the last time sometime around 1861. One of the names referenced on the verso, "Covert," appears in Whitman's short story "Revenge and Requital" (1845) and his novel Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852). The name is also mentioned in an early notebook draft of the plot of Jack Engle (see "a schoolmaster").


Riddle Song, A

Whitman Archive Title: The Dalliance of the Eagles
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00184
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Dalliance of the Eagles (1880). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25.8 x 18.6 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in ink on a proof of "The Dalliance of the Eagles," "Ah, little knows the Laborer," "Hast never come to thee an hour?," and "My Picture-Gallery," are 14 words of notations in Whitman's hand. The proof has been pasted to a heavy piece of paper, on the verso of which is "A Riddle Song," part of "Italian Music in Dakota," and a clipped headline reading "The Society Articles Save Labor. Lighten the Labor for Mother."



Whitman Archive Title: A Riddle Song
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00015
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: A Riddle Song (1881). A.MS. drafts.
Date: 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 22 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of the first five lines of "A Riddle Song," first published in 1880. The draft is written in ink on a surface made by pasting three smaller pieces together. Another small fourth scrap is pasted to the opposite side.



Whitman Archive Title: A Riddle Song
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00290
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: A Riddle Song (1881). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Proof sheet of "A Riddle Song," first published in 1880, with corrections in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: A Riddle Song
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00027
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Date: 1880
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten; printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Manuscript and corrected proof of "A Riddle Song," a poem which first appeared in the Tarrytown Sunnyside Press on 3 April 1880. It was reprinted in Forney’s Progress (Philadelphia) 2 (17 April 1880): 508, and then included in the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. Also included is a cover note that describes the contents and declares that Whitman presented them to Richard Bucke on 26 May 1880.



Whitman Archive Title: A Riddle Song
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00097
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 4
Date: 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, newspaper clipping
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Clipping of the poem "A Riddle Song" probably from the Camden Daily Post, as is suggested by writing on the verso. The reference to the Tarrytown Sunnyside Press in the bottom right corner serves to credit the newspaper in which Whitman's poem first appeared.


Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps

Whitman Archive Title: I cross'd the Nevadas
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00009
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These six lines make up a draft of "Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps," which was published in Drum-Taps in 1865 and in subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass.


Robert Burns as Poet and Person

Whitman Archive Title: Robert Burns
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00158
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 69
Repository Title: Robert Burns
Date: 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 10 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20
Content: This is a draft for the article entitled "Robert Burns" published on 16 December 1882 in The Critic. The draft contains annotated clippings from a previous article on Burns that Whitman had published on 25 January 1875 in Our Land and Time (the article was copied the same day in the New York Daily Graphic.) Parts of the previous 1875 article were used in the 1882 article. Later, Whitman revised the article again for publication in the North American Review in November 1886 under the title "Robert Burns as Poet and Person." The same title was kept for later versions published in November Boughs, Democratic Vistas and Other Papers in 1888; in Complete Poems & Prose in 1888 and in Complete Prose Works in 1891-1892. For more on this, see Gary Scharnhorst, "Whitman on Robert Burns: An Early Essay Recovered," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 13 (Spring 1996), 4.



Whitman Archive Title: There will never come a time
Whitman Archive ID: brn.00004
Repository: Brown University: Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays
Repository Title: There will never come a time : prose draft, [ca. 1840-1890]
Repository ID: Ms.30.94
Date: 1871-1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This prose manuscript fragment, heavily revised, appears to be part of an early draft of the essay "Robert Burns," first published in the January 25, 1875 issue of Our Land and Time. Whitman revised and republished it several times. In Complete Prose Works (1892) the essay was titled "Robert Burns as Poet and Person." The draft is written on the reverse of the bottom half of a report by Secretary of the Treasury, George Boutwell, of the public debt as of January 31, 1871.



Whitman Archive Title: [It will seem strange]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05244
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Burns says
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05247
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Though the spare hours
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05263
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Burns as Poet and Person.
Whitman Archive ID: bec.00001
Repository: Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, Buffalo, New York: James Fraser Gluck Papers
Date: 1886
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 13 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Fair copy prepared for publication in the North American Review of November 1886 under the title "Robert Burns as Poet and Person." The leaves that make up this manuscript incorporate parts of a previous version, published in the New York Critic of December 16, 1882. That essay was itself a revision of an essay published in Our Land and Time and the New York Daily Graphic on January 25, 1875. The first page of this manuscript bears a note written by James Redpath, the editor of the North American Review in 1886. Images of the versos are unavailable because the leaves have been mounted and bound in a volume that also includes a frontispiece from the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. A note on the volume's cover reads "Presented by James Redpath, to James Fraser Gluck for the Buffalo Library A. D. 1886."


Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone

Whitman Archive Title: [Breast Sorrel]
Whitman Archive ID: med.00775
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: before 1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: A brief list, which Grier suggests could be trial titles for "Calamus.". However, this manuscript is specifically suggestive of "Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone," in which Whitman writes about "Breast-sorrel and pinks of love"—both phrases which can be linked to this manuscript. First published as "Calamus. 13" in Leaves of Grass (1860), this poem appeared in later editions of Leaves of Grass as "Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone", and with slight changes in the text. This manuscript is known only from a transcription published by Richard Maurice Bucke in Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 164.



Whitman Archive Title: Buds
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00308
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On pink leaf (21.5 x 13 cm), in black ink, with minor revisions in the same ink. A few pinholes at top and near center. A pencil question mark appears in parentheses in the upper-right corner. The number 52 appears to have been revised from 51. After adding several verses, Whitman designated this poem section 13 of "Calamus" in the 1860 Leaves, and, after dropping the first two and last three lines of the 1860 version, permanently retitled it "Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone" in 1867.


Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete, The

Whitman Archive Title: The endless Catalogue Divine
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00291
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete (1891). A. MS. drafts.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A badly stained draft of a poem published as "The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete" in 1891.



Whitman Archive Title: The real earthly catalogue divine, 'complete'
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00017
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete (1891). A. MS. drafts.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of a poem published as "The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete" in 1891, written in ink on a piece of paper to that of "The endless Catalogue Divine" (loc.00291), with a discarded envelope (addressed to Miss Olive Percival, 214 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles, CA) opened out and pasted to the bottom of the piece, and some corrections in both pencil and ink.


Runner, The

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Fables
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00103
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 76
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1850s
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two sets of deleted verses constitute adaptations of lines from Whitman's pre-1855 unpublished notebook "Pictures" "Now this is the fable of the mirror" and "And Now this is the fable of a beautiful statue." Two other deleted potential fables ideas also appear: "The trained runner" and "The five old men." At the foot of the leaf appears the note "last piece (still another Death Song— Death Song with prophecies." All of the sections are demarcated with horizontal lines. Based on Whitman's use of the tax blank, the manuscript appears to be a set of notes he made between 1857 and 1859 while preparing the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. The "Poem of Fables" as such never materialized, but a poem simply titled "Fables" was incorporated into the second section of the poem "Passage to India", first published in 1871. Whitman's "Pictures" were not published in their entirety until 1925. Whitman uses the phrase "well-train'd runner" in "The Runner", a poem which first appeared in Leaves of Grass in 1867.



Whitman Archive Title: Pictures
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00042
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 4
Repository Title: Pictures
Date: between 1850 and 1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Poetry manuscript titled "Pictures," approximately six lines, heavily revised. The first few lines of this manuscript appeared, further revised, in "The Runner," first published in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. The middle section of the manuscript is possibly related to "Song of the Banner at Daybreak," which was first published in 1865 in Drum-Taps. A different version of last the two lines of the manuscript appear in another poetry draft, also titled "Pictures," now in Yale University's Beinecke Library. The writing on the verso is not Whitman's.


Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht

Whitman Archive Title: Sail out for good? for aye, O mystic yacht!
Whitman Archive ID: bos.00003
Repository: Boston University: The Alice and Rollo G. Silver Collection
Box: 1
Repository Title: Sail Forth O Mystic Yacht
Date: 1890 or 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a heavily revised draft of "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!" The poem was first published in Lippincott's Magazine in March 1891 with "Sounds of the Winter," "The Unexpress'd," and "After the Argument" under the general title "Old-Age Echoes." The manuscript leaf is made from two scraps pasted together. On the reverse of one of them is an envelope addressed to Whitman, bearing several postmarks from June 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00229
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 30 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft titled "Old Age Recitatives" written on the verso of an envelope and a letter (author unknown) stuck together. Beneath the main title and Whitman's signature is another title, "Sail out for good, Eidólon yacht!" The text of the poem is identical to the published version of "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!" (1891). Whitman has written a note about Arena magazine's rejection of the poem in the top right margin.



Whitman Archive Title: [casts off her moorings]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00018
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht! (1888). A.MS. drafts and notes.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial lines for "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!," which was published first in 1891. On the verso is a letter from Harry C. Kochersperger dated June 27, 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: Sail forth O mystic yacht of me
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00040
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht! (1888). A.MS. drafts and notes.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial lines for "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!," which was published first in 1891. On part of the page is prose that appears to be a journal entry. The rest, though, is dedicated to a draft of the poem, with the title written half way down the page: "Sail forth O mystic yacht of me." On the verso is written "Walt Whitman, July 30 1890" twice.



Whitman Archive Title: [But outset and sure]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00106
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 85
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 17.5 x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains trial verses for the poem "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!," first published in the March 1891 issue of Lippincott's Magazine in a group titled "Old-Age Echoes". The top part of this manuscript has been cut away, leaving the emendations to what would become line 5 of the poem only partly visible. Whitman grouped "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!" in his "Second Annex," titled "Good-Bye My Fancy", to the 1891 edition of Leaves of Grass. The pencil note "Sail Out for good, Eidólon Yacht / Good Bye My Fancy / Page 7" appears in the lower left corner, below two new drafts of the ending lines.



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age Echoes
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00228
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Echoes (1891). Proof Sheet.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28.5 x 16.5 cm, 6 x 14 cm attached, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof sheet of "Old Age Echoes" with many corrections written in ink and pencil. "Old Age Echoes" is a general heading for four poems: "Sounds of the Winter," "The Unexpress'd," "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!," and "After the Argument."



Whitman Archive Title: Old-Age Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00232
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 28 x 21 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Proof pages of six poems collected under the general title "Old-Age Recitatives." The poems included are: "Old Chants" (1891), "On, On the Same,Ye Jocund Twain!" (1891), "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!" (1891), "L. of G.'s Purport" (only two lines of the twelve-line poem of the same title first published in 1891), "My task" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), and "For us two, reader dear" (1891). At the top of the first page is a note to the printer in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: Sail out for Good Eidolon yacht
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00041
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Sail Out for Good, Eidolón Yacht! (1888). A.MS. drafts and notes.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Note regarding "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!," which was published first in 1891. Written on this small white sheet are the title of the poem ("Sail out for good Eidólon yacht") and trial phrases for what appears to be a subtitle.



Whitman Archive Title: Sail out for good, Eidólon yacht
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00067
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: bv6
Folder:
Repository Title: Good-bye My Fancy: Sail out for Good, Eidólon Yacht
Date: 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily revised draft, nine lines, of "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!" which was first published in Lippincott's Magazine in March 1891. It was reprinted in Good-bye My Fancy (1891). Whitman's note at the bottom calls the manuscript rough crude outlines and dates it July 25 1890. Included with the manuscript is a three-page letter to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, dated 1878, drafted on the reverse sides of letters from Berry Young and Richard M. Bucke.



Whitman Archive Title: Old-Age Recitatives
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00231
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Recitatives (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: between 1890-1891
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 30.5 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A galley proof of a group of six poems titled "Old-Age Recitatives." The poems included are: "Sail out for good, Eidolon yacht!" (first published in 1891), "My task" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), "L. of G.'s Purport" (only the first two lines of the poem of the same title published in 1891), "Death dogs my steps" (published as part of "L. of G.'s Purport" in 1891), "For us two, reader dear" (first published in 1891), and "Grand is the seen" (first published in 1891). On the verso is a note to the printer.


Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight

Whitman Archive Title: Like Earth O River
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00106
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: Like Earth O River, you offer us burial
Date: 1848
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These lines were probably drafted as part of the poem published as "The Mississippi at Midnight" on March 6, 1848, in the New Orleans Daily Crescent, though they were not included in the published version of the poem. A revised version of the poem, titled "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight," was later included in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). Whitman left for New Orleans in February, 1848, so this manuscript was written after that date. Draft lines on the back of this manuscript leaf (nyp.00736) also relate to the poem eventually titled "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight."



Whitman Archive Title: Sailing Down the Mississippi at Midnight
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00736
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: Leaf mounted at left, via a hinge along the top edge of the manuscript, with one holograph manuscript written on a scrap of paper: Sailing down the Mississippi at Midnight
Date: February 1848
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a partial draft of the poem published as "The Mississippi at Midnight" on March 6, 1848, in the New Orleans Daily Crescent. A revised version of the poem, titled "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight," was later included in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). Whitman left for New Orleans in February, 1848, so this manuscript was almost certainly written in that month. Draft lines on the back of this manuscript leaf (nyp.001066) also probably relate to the poem eventually titled "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight."


Salut au Monde!

Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Young Men
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00285
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: 1856 or before
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript with ideas for a poem, possibly "Salut Au Monde!" which was first published in 1856 as "Poem of Salutation." This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Companions."



Whitman Archive Title: Religions—Gods
Whitman Archive ID: bpl.00003
Repository: Boston Public Library: The Walt Whitman Collection
Repository Title: Notes on 'Religions—Gods'
Repository ID: Whitman Mss.7
Date: about 1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Two pages of reading notes on various world religions and religious figures, based partly on Constantin-François Chasseboeuf comte de Volney's Ruins; or Meditations on the Revolution of Empires (Paris: Levrault, 1802). Edward Grier suggests that "the other material probably came from WW's reading in Bunsen or in magazines" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984] 6: 2024). Included are lists of names, definitions, quotations, descriptions, and dates. Many of the notes are written on small sheets of paper which have been glued to the larger sheets. Whitman drew upon this material explicitly in writing "Salut au Monde!," which was first published as "Poem of Salutation" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Europe
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00884
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 12mo 27
Date: Between 1850 and 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A list of European rivers, lakes, and cities, many of which were included in "Poem of Salutation" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. In the 1860 edition of Leaves, and in all subsequent editions, the poem was titled "Salut Au Monde!" On the reverse (duk.00029) are poetic lines that may relate to the first edition of Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: Asia
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00886
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 14
Date: About 1855 or 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains notes and draft lines that are related to a poem published first as "Poem of Salutation" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass and later as "Salut Au Monde!" Whitman's use of the word "tabounshic" in this manuscript is unusual. He used it (spelled "tabounschik") only in the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass in the poem eventually titled "A Song for Occupations." In other respects, however, that poem does not appear to be related to these notes. The reverse side of the leaf (duk.00030) contains draft lines of the poem that was eventually titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore."



Whitman Archive Title: something that presents the sentiment
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00110
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A line in this manuscript appears in a long manuscript poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures." The first several lines of that poem were revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880. The notes written in ink on this manuscript probably relate to the poem that was eventually titled "Salut au Monde!" first published as "Poem of Salutation" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. The earlier lines written in pencil may relate to the sixth poem in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Faces." These connections suggest the manuscript was probably written in the early to mid-1850s. The manuscript is pasted down, so an image of the reverse is not currently available.



Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Pictures
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00289
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Repository Title: Leaves of Grass, [ca. 1855–1856], AMs, 12 fragments on 7 leaves
Date: Before 1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6.5 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A phrase beginning "Picture of one of/ the Greek games" appears in the upper right corner, delimited from the rest of the notes with two curved lines. The words "Spanish bull fight" appear in their own semicircle (damaged by Whitman's cutting) in the lower right corner. The lines seem to occupy a middle space between the very early notebook poem "Pictures" and the 1856 "Poem of Salutation" (ultimately "Salut au Monde!"). Therefore, the date of this manuscript is likely before 1856.



Whitman Archive Title: To the English
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00254
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 30
Date: before 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Ideas for a poem about various nationalities and ethnicities, suggestive of "Salut au Monde!" which was first published as "Poem of Salutation" in 1856. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "—Poem of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois," and no verso image is available.



Whitman Archive Title: And there
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00275
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Fragment describing a "negro at daylight" giving "the Carolina yell," possibly related to the poem first published in 1856 as "Poem of Salutation" and later titled "Salut Au Monde!" Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript fragment to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:313). This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "'The Scout'," "Drops of my Blood," and "In a poem make the."



Whitman Archive Title: Europe
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00304
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 16 x 14 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The recto notes represent an early stage of lines partially incorporated in "Poem of Salutation," the new third poem in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, which was permanently retitled "Salut au Monde!" in the 1860 edition. If the note or title "Europe" suggests that Whitman might have first intended to divide his salutations into discrete sections based on the different continents, this is a plan he did not follow in the published version(s). The more polished (but deleted) lines on the verso represent a recasting in poetic form of several lines from the 1855 Preface. These were further revised for the 1856 "Poem of Many in One," after which the first verse drafted on this page (cut off here, and beginning "over the Texan, Mexican, Florid[ian,]/ Cuban seas...") was dropped. The two verses below this, however, were preserved relatively unchanged through the poem's many transformations until the text was essentially fixed under the title "By Blue Ontario's Shore" in 1881.



Whitman Archive Title: [And as the shores of the sea I live near and love are to me]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00305
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 13 x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These two verses represent a draft of lines that would be further revised and incorporated in the new 1856 poem "Poem of Salutation," permanently retitled "Salut au Monde!" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.. A plate mark can be clearly seen on the verso.



Whitman Archive Title: [The circus boy is riding in the]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00010
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 10.5 x 14 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The verso lines (beginning with the individually deleted line "O Walt Whitman, show us some pictures!" and continuing "America, always Pictorial!") represent a later draft of the beginning of the poem "Pictures" than the most complete extant version, which is contained in the pre-1855 "Pictures" notebook currently housed at Yale University. Critics have dated the lines to around 1880, when Whitman was working on a short version of "Pictures" both for magazine publication and for the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass, where it was published as "My Picture-Gallery." But Whitman's early style of inscription in this draft, along with the line "It is round—it has room for America, north and south" and his use of his own name in the deleted first line, all suggest that Whitman may have inscribed this draft around the same time that he was working on the new 1856 "Poem of Salutations" (eventually "Salut au Monde!"). This draft also suggests that at one point he may have considered linking what would become "Poem of Salutations" and the formally and thematically similar "Pictures" more directly. The lines on the recto, divided by a horizontal line, refer to images of a circus boy on a fleet horse and of watching those on a shore disappear. The relationship between either of these lines and Whitman's published works is unclear.



Whitman Archive Title: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 7
Folder: Photocopies Notebooks [before 1855]
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 31 leaves, handwritten
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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: Russian serfs
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00685
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: Box II-5B 103
Date: 1855-1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Grouped with a collection of notes about Africa and Asia, this fragment notes that Russia "has 40 million of serfs, (or slaves)." With the paper suggesting a date of 1855 or 1856, this scrap may have been the impetus for Whitman's inclusion of "You Russian serf!" in his catalog of downtrodden peoples in "Poem of Salutation" in 1856; the poem would later be entitled "Salut Au Monde!" The reference to the "Russian serf" was dropped from the poem after the 1860 edition.



Whitman Archive Title: Africa (The Equator
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00686
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: Box II-5B 103
Date: 1855-1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Grouped with a collection of notes about Africa and Asia, these two leaves contain notes about geographic locations and features, mostly in Africa. Many of the place names are included in the 1856 poem "Poem of Salutation," later retitled "Salut Au Monde!" At least two longer lines from the manuscript also find their way into that poem: "fresh-sunned Mediterranean, and from one to another of its islands" (becoming "clear-sunned" in the poem) and "black venerable vast mother, the Nile."



Whitman Archive Title: [George Walker]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00143
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 37
Folder: 1855-1856, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry trial lines
Date: between 1855-1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 45 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:226–243, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Starting from Paumanok," "A Song for Occupations," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Salut au Monde!," "To One Shortly to Die," and "A Woman Waits for Me."



Whitman Archive Title: Bunsen
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00200
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Date: 1856 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Notes on Africa. Whitman used some of the place names and a version of one of the phrases here ("The fresh-sunned Mediterranean, and from one to another of its islands") in the 1856 "Poem of Salutation," which was eventually titled "Salut au Monde!"



Whitman Archive Title: Brutish human beings
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00085
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 12
Repository Title: Brutish human beings - wild men - the 'koboo'
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains notes by Whitman about what he calls "a very low kind of human beings," "wild men," the "koboo," apparently described to Whitman by Elias Pierson in June 1857. Pierson had been to China in the rebel army of Canton, and had seen the aboriginal "koboo" people, as reported in the manuscript, in the Ladrone islands, in the South China Sea off Canton. To reinforce the truthfulness of Pierson's stories about the "koboo," Whitman mentions the fact that Captain Walter Murray Gibson, who had also talked about the "koboo" people (possibly in the book Report, American Geographical and Statistical Society. Monthly Meeting. March, 1854. Captain Walter M. Gibson on the East Indian Archipelago: a Description of Its Wild Races of Men, published in 1854, and/or in The Prison of Weltevredin, and a Glance at the East Indian Archipelago, published in 1855), had affirmed that all his statements in the book were true and made in good faith. Since the term "koboo" is used by Whitman in "Song of Myself" (the term already appeared in the first published version of the poem, in the 1855 edition, and was retained in all the subsequent editions) and in "Salut au Monde!" (the term appeared in the first published version of the poem in the 1856 edition and was retained in all the subsequent editions), it is probable that Whitman first learned about the "koboo" by reading Gibson, and then heard again about them from Pierson. The manuscript also contains a clipping of a short newspaper column entitled "The Wild Men of Borneo," and a short comment on it.



Whitman Archive Title: Salut Au Monde
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00292
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Salut Au Monde (1886). A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 13 leaves, handwritten, printed
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Content: Pages of"Salut Au Monde!" as printed in the 1871–72 edition of Leaves of Grass, heavily corrected for publication in the 1881–82 edition This poem had originally been published in 1856 under the title "Poem of Salutation."


Savantism

Whitman Archive Title: Savantism
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00226
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Originally numbered 52 and revised by overwriting to 53. Ungrouped in the 1860 and 1867 Leaves of Grass, the poem "Savantism" was transferred to Passage to India in 1871 and from there to "Leaves of Grass" groups in the "Passage to India" annexes of the 1872 Leaves of Grass and the 1876 Two Rivulets. From there it was moved, finally (in 1881), to the "Inscriptions" cluster within the main body of Leaves of Grass.


Says

Whitman Archive Title: Says
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00227
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21 x 12.5 cm to 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These manuscript lines were revised to form numbered sections 1 through 4 of the ungrouped poem "Says" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman cut four verse paragraphs from the poem in the 1867 Leaves of Grass version; from that point on the shortened poem appeared, ungrouped, under the title "Suggestions" until its final appearance in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Says
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00228
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 12.5 cm to 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These manuscript lines were revised to form numbered section 5 of the ungrouped poem "Says" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman cut four verse paragraphs in the 1867 Leaves of Grass version; from that point on the shortened poem appeared, ungrouped, under the title "Suggestions" until its final appearance in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Says
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00229
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 12.5 cm to 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These manuscript lines were revised to form numbered section 6 of the ungrouped poem "Says" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman cut four verse paragraphs in the 1867 Leaves of Grass version; from that point on the shortened poem appeared, ungrouped, under the title "Suggestions" until its final appearance in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Says
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00230
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 12.5 cm to 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These manuscript lines were revised to form numbered section 7 of the ungrouped poem "Says" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman cut four verse paragraphs in the 1867 Leaves of Grass version; from that point on the shortened poem appeared, ungrouped, under the title "Suggestions" until its final appearance in 1876. The cancelled lines on the top section of the manuscript appear to be a draft of lines that were never published but that bear great resemblance to the various "Thoughts" and "Thought (Of . . .)" poems Whitman published throughout the many editions of Leaves of Grass.


Scantlings. White

Whitman Archive Title: Scantlings
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00061
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 202
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript containing ideas about a race of scantlings, a product of "the strong growth of America." Written on a scrap of the paper cover stock used for some late copies of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass; however, the connection of this manuscript to Whitman's published work is unknown.


Scented Herbage of My Breast

Whitman Archive Title: [Was it I who walked the]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00246
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf that folds out, 21.5 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These leaves comprise two sections of a poem inscribed (with very few alterations) on the first and third sides of a folded half-sheet of paper. On the first side of the folded leaf a blue pencil was used to correct a pencil number 7 to a 1, and on the third side the blue pencil corrected a pencil 8 to a 2. The five verses beginning "Was it I who walked the / earth..." were not used in "Calamus," but the five lines beginning "Scented herbage of my breast" became the opening verses of section 2 of the cluster in the 1860 Leaves of Grass. In the 1867 and later editions the first line was used as the title of the poem.



Whitman Archive Title: [I do not know whether]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00243
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 5 leaves, 20 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: The verses on the recto became lines 6-40 of section 2 of "Calamus" in the 1860 edition. Section 2 of the Calamus group was permanently retitled "Scented Herbage of my Breast" in 1867. On the verso appears a draft of an editorial, "Important Questions in Brooklyn.—," which Whitman apparently never published but which seems to have inspired at least two published editorials on the Brooklyn Water Works and the political quarrels surrounding control of the project. The editorials appeared in the Brooklyn Times of March 15 and 16, 1859.


Scintillations from mid-aged

Whitman Archive Title: Scintillations
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00115
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 4
Repository Title: Scintilla
Date:
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of several partial lines or trial titles, the relation of which to Whitman's published work is not known.


Scout, The

Whitman Archive Title: 'The Scout'
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00276
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: about 1855 or later
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript suggesting "The Scout" as a good title for a poem, magazine, or newspaper. No connection to Whitman's published work is known. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "And there," "Drops of my Blood," and "In a poem make the."


Sculpture—then sculpture was necessary

Whitman Archive Title: Sculpture
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00148
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: Sculpture
Date: 1840s or 1850s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These notes about sculpture have some similarity to a line in the 1855 poem eventually titled "A Song for Occupations." Edward Grier notes that the "writing seems to be that of the early notebooks; thus the date might be in the 1850s" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2033).


Sea-Drift

Whitman Archive Title: Sea-Drift
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00135
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 86
Date:
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 20 leaves, 20 cm x 12 cm, corrected proofs
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Content: Revision of poem cluster originally titled "Sea-Shore Memories" contained in red bound volume measuring 26 cm x 18 cm. Revisions are made in ink and pencil on printed edition of the poem. WW apparently used two volumes to tear the leaves from, as every other page is slightly smaller than the rest; revisions are made only on the recto side of each leaf, verso is crossed out. Several leaves are cut apart and pasted in new order on other leaves or on lined paper. Leaf 8 is a handwritten MS.


Sea-Shore Fancies

Whitman Archive Title: [Ever since I have written]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00044
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 60
Repository Title: Sea-Shore Fancies
Date: 1876–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: A nearly complete draft of "Sea-Shore Fancies," a short prose piece that first appeared in the 29 January 1881 issue of The Critic, as part of "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes. (No. 1)," under the section heading "A Fine Winter Day on the Beach." Whitman later divided this section into two separate items. The draft represented here was eventually published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), under the title "Sea-Shore Fancies," and later collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Secrets.—Secreta

Whitman Archive Title: Secrets.—Secreta
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00283
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 31
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Ideas for two poems, one listing "all the things done in secret," and the other involving a "vocabularium" of words and phrases. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Religious Canticles."


seems perpetually goading me

Whitman Archive Title: seems perpetually goading
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00090
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: ? seems perpetually goading me
Date: 1840s or early 1850s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A manuscript about "corruption," "putridity," and "maggots" growing out of the "too richly manured manured earth," with no known relation to any of Whitman's published works. Edward Grier posits that this manuscript was written in the 1840s or early 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:156). The manuscript is pasted down, making the verso inaccessible.


September 11, 12, 13—1850

Whitman Archive Title: September 11, 12, 13—1850
Whitman Archive ID: hyb.00016
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: Mother's family lived
Date: Between 1850 and 1883
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript, consisting of two leaves, features an autobiographical account of Whitman's visit to his birthplace in Huntington, Long Island. Whitman mentions this visit in "The Old Whitman and Van Velsor Cemeteries," an 1881 recollection published in Specimen Days. Although Whitman probably wrote the manuscript during or shortly after the visit in September 1850, he returned to it as late as 1883, adding a note at the end of the piece about the death of his stepuncle (see Edward Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:4). At some point, the leaves of the manuscript became separated, and the first leaf wound up at the University of Virginia and the second at Duke University. We have presented them here as one object.



Whitman Archive Title: September 11, 12, 13—1850
Whitman Archive ID: hyb.00016
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Repository Title: "Walt Whitman: A description of His Birthplace..."
Date: Between 1850 and 1883
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript, consisting of two leaves, features an autobiographical account of Whitman's visit to his birthplace in Huntington, Long Island. Whitman mentions this visit in "The Old Whitman and Van Velsor Cemeteries," an 1881 recollection published in Specimen Days. Although Whitman probably wrote the manuscript during or shortly after the visit in September 1850, he returned to it as late as 1883, adding a note at the end of the piece about the death of his stepuncle (see Edward Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:4). At some point, the leaves of the manuscript became separated, and the first leaf wound up at the University of Virginia and the second at Duke University. We have presented them here as one object.


Shakspere for America

Whitman Archive Title: The Old World
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00142
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS f 37
Date: 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A partial draft of Whitman's essay "Shakespeare for America," which was first published in the magazine Poet-Lore on September 15, 1890. The piece would later be reprinted in the Critic (titled "Shakspere for America") on September 27, 1890, and then included in Whitman's Good-Bye My Fancy in 1891 and Complete Prose Works in 1892. On the reverse is a letter from John W. Cook, dated 9 February 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: Shakspere for America Manuscript
Whitman Archive ID: fol.00006
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library
Repository Title: Shakspere for America [manuscript], 1890
Repository ID: Y.d.1035
Date: September 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A portion of a letter sent by Whitman to the editors of Poet-Lore in September 1890. The second half of the letter is now held at Duke University. The majority of the letter was reprinted, nearly verbatim, under the title "Shakespeare for America," in the September 1890 issue of Poet-Lore, and was a response to a piece entitled "Walt Whitman's View of Shakespeare," by Jonathan Trumbull, which appeared in the July issue. With a slightly altered title, "Shakspere for America" was later reprinted in The Critic on 27 September 1890, as well as in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) and Complete Prose Works (1892).


Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher

Whitman Archive Title: Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00083
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: bv2
Folder:
Repository Title: Shakespeare-Bacon's Cipher
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, proof with handwritten correction
View images: 1
Content: Page proof with handwritten corrections. This poem first appeared as "Shakspere Bacon's Cipher" in The Cosmopolitan 4 (October 1887): 142. It was reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) under the title "Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher." An image of the verso is forthcoming.



Whitman Archive Title: Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00084
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: bv2
Folder:
Repository Title: Shakespeare-Bacon's Cipher
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, proof with handwritten correction
View images: 1
Content: Proofs with handwritten corrections and additions. The poem first appeared as "Shakspere Bacon's Cipher" in The Cosmopolitan 4 (October 1887): 142. It was reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) under the title "Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher."



Whitman Archive Title: The Mystic Cipher
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00220
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: The Mystic Cipher. A.MS. draft.
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 9.5 x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of a poem later revised and published as "Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher" in 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00294
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 14.5 cm, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher," which was published first in 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02413
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 14.5 cm, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher," which was published first in 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02414
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 14.5 cm, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher," which was published first in 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04122
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher (1891). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 14.5 cm, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher," which was published first in 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: Shakspere's Cipher
Whitman Archive ID: tem.00001
Repository: Temple University: Rare Books and Manuscripts, Special Collections
Date: 1887–1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Lightly corrected draft of "Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher," which was published first in The Cosmopolitan (October 1887) and reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891).



Whitman Archive Title: Shakspere—Bacon's Cipher
Whitman Archive ID: tem.00003
Repository: Temple University: Rare Books and Manuscripts, Special Collections
Date: 1887–1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Printed proof, with a single correction, of "Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher," which was published first in The Cosmopolitan (October 1887) and reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891).


Ship Ahoy!

Whitman Archive Title: Ship Ahoy!
Whitman Archive ID: aas.00001
Repository: American Antiquarian Society: Bolton-Stanwood Family Papers
Repository ID: octavo vol. 28, p.103
Date: January 2, 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a late draft of "Ship Ahoy!," first published in Youth's Companion on March 12, 1891. The draft is relatively clean, though there are some differences between this manuscript and the published poem. On the verso of the manuscript is a cancelled letter to Whitman from William S. Ingram, dated December 24, 1890.


Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim, A

Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman. 1862.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00026
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


Silent Little Follower—the Coreopsis, A

Whitman Archive Title: the RR we go on
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00242
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 111
Date: 1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 8 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16
Content: Pages of notes from Whitman's western railroad journey in September 1879. The pages describe his travels through Missouri and Kansas, and large portions of the notes would find their way into Specimen Days (specifically, the sections entitled "Missouri State," "Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas," "Art Features," and "A Silent Little Follower—The Coreopsis").


Singer in the Prison, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Singer in the Prison
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00010
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: The singer in the prison
Repository ID: HM 11206
Date: about 1869
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: This is draft of "The Singer in the Prison," a poem first published in December 25, 1869 issue of Saturday Evening Visitor with the subtitle "A Christmas Incident." Whitman included it, without subtitle, in the "Leaves of Grass" cluster of Passage to India (1871). Finally, in the 1881–82 edition it became part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster.



Whitman Archive Title: The Singer in the Prison
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00001
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 47
Repository Title: The Singer in the Prison
Date: ca. 1875
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A corrected proof of the poem "The Singer in the Prison," first published in the Saturday Evening Visitor (25 December 1869), reprinted in Passage to India (1871) and Leaves of Grass (1881–1882 and 1891–1892). Notes in pencil indicate Whitman was thinking of a potential connection with Parepa Rosa, a famous nineteenth-century opera singer. The verso contains prose notes about horses.


Sky—Days and Nights—Happiness, The

Whitman Archive Title: [?Part of the Sky]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00039
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 55
Repository Title: Part of the sky
Date: 1876–1877
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A heavily revised draft fragment of "The Sky—Days and Nights—Happiness," a section of prose that appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and was later published in Complete Prose Works (1892). This manuscript includes Whitman's notes and thoughts on Byron, happiness, and the "German legend of the King's Bell." Whitman composed this draft on the verso of a letter sent from Richard J. Hinton, dated 12 December.



Whitman Archive Title: [Night of Oct 11]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00040
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 56
Repository Title: Night of Oct. 11—
Date: 1876–1877
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A small scrap of paper containing Whitman's notes on the night sky, "the heavens unusually transparent." Though Whitman dates this note "night of Oct 11," the description which appeared in "The Sky—Days and Nights—Happiness," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) is dated "Night of Oct. 28." "The Sky—Days and Nights—Happiness" was later published in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [The Sky Monday]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00095
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 64
Repository Title: Still, bright mellow forenoon
Date: about 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Notes on the sky, dated 13 November 1876, and that contributed to "The Sky—Days and Nights—Happiness," which appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) before being collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: (The Sky)
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00099
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 68
Repository Title: How cheap and common and unfailing
Date: about 1877
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes, dated 14 July 1877, that contributed to "The Sky—Days and Nights—Happiness," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), and collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [Sky]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00041
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 57
Repository Title: Sky
Date: 1878
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A partial draft of "The Sky—Days and Nights—Happiness," initially dated Oct 19 '78; however, Whitman seems to have been unsure about the precise date of these notes. Whitman seems to have revised this date more than once. In the upper-left-hand corner of the page Whitman indicates that these lines refer to a night in November: "? Later—Nov. Sky." The published version that appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) indicates that these notes describe a time "Early in November." "The Sky—Days and Nights—Happiness" was later published in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Sky
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00092
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 61
Repository Title: In all the manifold shows of the universe
Date: about 1878
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A heavily revised draft on the "vastness" of the human soul. Portions of this manuscript were revised and used in "The Sky—Days and Nights—Happiness," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), and collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Slang in America

Whitman Archive Title: How Would it Do
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05173
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [? divide into two]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05188
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Names and Slang]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05189
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [(for name?]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05186
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [? or Names]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05187
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Sleepers, The

Whitman Archive Title: Poem incarnating the mind
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00346
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: No doubt the efflux of the soul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00025
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Undated Thoughts, Ideas, and Trial lines (3 V.)
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: This notebook consists almost entirely of prose. However, the ideas and language developed throughout the notebook can be linked to a number of poems that appeared in Leaves of Grass, including "Song of Myself," "Great are the Myths" (ultimately shortened to a few lines and titled "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night"), "Faces," "The Sleepers," and "To Think of Time," versions of which appeared in Leaves of Grass in 1855. One manuscript passage is similar to a passage in the preface to the 1855 edition. Thus, this notebook was almost certainly written before that date. Content from the first several paragraphs of this notebook was also used slightly revised in "Song of the Open Road," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves as "Poem of the Road."



Whitman Archive Title: Talbot Wilson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00141
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Light and air
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00260
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 4
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Language from the manuscript appears in the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The phrase "light and air" also appears in the fourth poem of that edition, eventually titled "The Sleepers." The supplied first line, beginning "Under this rank coverlid," was added to a transcription of the manuscript that appears in Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 16. The line is not currently written on the manuscript.



Whitman Archive Title: Sweet flag
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00883
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: Song of Myself (Autograph MS, draft portions) To be at all...
Repository ID: MS q 2
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. This manuscript, filled with suggestive words and phrases, appears to have contributed to the first and fourth poems in the volume, eventually titled "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers," respectively. The phrase the phrase "polished melons" is reminiscent of the line "I reach to the leafy lips . . . . I reach to the polished breasts of melons" in "Song of Myself," and the list in this manuscript may relate to the following line: "Root of washed sweet-flag, timorous pond-snipe, nest of guarded duplicate eggs, it shall be you." Other elements of this manuscript appear to have contributed to "The Sleepers." The jotting "I am a look / mystic / in a trance/ exaltation" may have led to the line "I am a dance . . . . Play up there! the fit is whirling me fast." Further, the reference to the soothing hand is perhaps an early version of the passage in which the narrator, who stands "with drooping eyes by the worstsuffering and restless," passes his "hands soothingly to and fro a few inches from them." Finally, the passage about "Sap that flows from the end of the manly maple" (associated in the manuscript with the "tooth of delight" and "tooth prong") probably contributed to the following passage in the same poem: "The white teeth stay, and the boss-tooth advances in darkness, / And liquor is spilled on lips and bosoms by touching glasses, and the best liquor afterward." These lines were removed from the final versioen of the poem. The writing on the reverse side of the leaf (duk.00001) contributed to a different part of the poem that became "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: In his presence
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00483
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: Between 1850 and 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: Whitman probably inscribed the material in this notebook in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Some of Whitman's language about the poet and religion in this notebook is similar to the language and ideas used in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Content from leaf 10 verso (see twentieth image) was revised and used in "The Sleepers," the poem eventually titled "The Sleepers," which first appeared in Leaves of Grass (1855), including the following lines: "Now the vast dusk bulk that is the whale's bulk . . . . it seems mine, / Warily, sportsman! though I lie so sleepy and sluggish, my tap is death" (1855, p. 74). The passage likely also relates to the following lines in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself": "How the flukes splash! / How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!" (1855, p. 48). Content from leaf 13 recto (see twenty-fifth image) may relate to other sections of the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: I am become a shroud
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00030
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines in the manuscript are drafts of lines in the first and fourth poems of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers." On the back of this manuscript is a prose fragment containing phrases that later became part of the poem "Unnamed Lands," first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: I am a curse
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00256
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 18.5 x 17.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. It is a draft of lines that appeared in the fourth poem in that edition, eventually titled "The Sleepers." Fragmentary poetic lines on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00602) may relate to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: Black Lucifer was not dead
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00257
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 10.5 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. It is a draft of lines that appeared in the fourth poem in that edition, eventually titled "The Sleepers." The word "Sleepchaser's" appears in the upper right corner, perhaps indicating that Whitman was considering a title similar to the 1860–1861 and 1867 title "Sleep-Chasings" even before the poem was first published in 1855, unless this is in fact a reworking of the section for the 1860–1861 edition. The possibility of a post-1855 dating, however, appears to be slight given the similarities of paper choice and inscription techniques among other leaves and similarities to drafts in "Talbot Wilson" (loc.00141), an early Library of Congress notebook. The poem "Sleep-Chasings" eventually became "The Sleepers" in 1871–1872.



Whitman Archive Title: Topple down upon him
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00258
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15.5 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. It is a draft of lines that appear in the fourth poem of that edition, eventually titled "The Sleepers." A revised version of the phrase "pennies on their eyes" appears in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." Lines on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00566) relate to the poem eventually titled "Faces."



Whitman Archive Title: The sores on my shoulders
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00260
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript is a draft of a section of the fourth poem in that edition, eventually titled "The Sleepers." Lines on the back of this leaf (uva.00565) relate to the manuscript poem "Pictures."



Whitman Archive Title: Poem [As in Visions of]
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00258
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 30
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Notes for a poem about night "visions," possibly related to the fourth poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "The Sleepers." Fragments of an unidentified newspaper clipping about the Puget Sound area have been pasted to the leaf. An image of the verso is not available.



Whitman Archive Title: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: The Sleepers
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00295
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: The Sleepers (1855). A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 12 leaves, 11.5 x 20.5 cm, 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: A bound copy of corrected pages of "The Sleepers"from the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass. The corrections are written in ink, purple ink (faded red?) and blue pencil on every page and are for the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. There is a portrait of Whitman opposite a title page reading "Sleepers, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof."


Small Memoranda

Whitman Archive Title: [A Glint inside of Abraham Lincoln]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00406
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 39
Repository Title: A Glint inside of Abraham Lincoln's Appointment - one item of many
Repository ID: #9778 item 5
Date: 22 August 1865
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript contains a large part of the account of Abraham Lincoln's appointment of James Harlan as Secretary of the Interior, which was first published in November Boughs in 1888 with the title of "Small Memoranda" and was later retained the Complete Prose Works, published in 1892.



Whitman Archive Title: [Immense numbers (several thousands)]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00149
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 55
Date: 1865
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft fragment of "Small Memoranda," first published in November Boughs (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: Small Memoranda
Whitman Archive ID: med.00790
Repository: Private Collection of Kendall Reed
Date: 1865 or later
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Composed on a piece of Attorney General's Office stationery, this manuscript is a draft fragment of "Small Memoranda," which first appeared in November Boughs (1888), and was collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). For further information on this manuscript, see Ed Folsom. "Whitman's Manuscript Draft of 'Small Memoranda,'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 26.2 [Fall 2008], 122-123.


Small the Theme of My Chant

Whitman Archive Title: [The Epos of a Life]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00196
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Epos of a Life… A.MS. draft.
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 13.75 x 20.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An unpublished poem written on a piece of lined stationery.



Whitman Archive Title: Inscription
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00060
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 46
Repository ID: #3829
Date: between 1855 and 1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript entitled "Inscription" appears to be a revision of other "Inscriptions" Whitman gathered in a notebook, along with prose drafts for a never-finished introduction to Leaves of Grass, and attached to his copy of the 1855 paper-bound edition. (The entire collection of draft "inscription" and introductory material is currently housed at the New York Public Library.) In the 1867 Leaves of Grass Whitman culled material from this poem and the other "Inscription" poems to create an italicized "Inscription" that he placed before "Starting from Paumanok" at the beginning of the book; in that edition he also transferred part of verse 2 to "As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario's Shore" (later the line was dropped and the title was revised to "By Blue Ontario's Shore"). From 1872 onward, this poem, revised and retitled "One's-Self I Sing," was printed as the first of several poems in the "Inscriptions" cluster that opened the book. In the 1888 November Boughs, however, Whitman reprinted the 1867 version as "Small the Theme of my Chant." Note: This manuscript draft may have been written before the Civil War, since it does not include the 1867 line "My Days I sing, and the Lands—with interstice I knew / of hapless War."



Whitman Archive Title: Inscription To the Reader at the entrance of Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00520
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1860–1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11
Content: One of a series of draft introductions Whitman prepared for Leaves of Grass, but which were never printed during his lifetime. This particular introduction, composed entirely in verse, was reworked and revised multiple times. Though "Inscription To the Reader at the entrance of Leaves of Grass" did not appear in print as a distinct and cohesive piece until collected by Clifton Joseph Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop (1928), portions of this draft were distilled into "One's-self I Sing," first published as "Inscription" in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman revised this poem before including it as "One's-self I Sing" in 1871, dropping some of the lines only to reintroduce them in "Sands at Seventy" (1888), under the title "Small the Theme of My Chant." Both "One's-self I Sing" and "Small the Theme of My Chant" appeared in the 1891-92 edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines from this manuscript were also revised and used in the poem "So Long!," which first appeared in the 1860-61 edition of Leaves of Grass. The verso of the last leaf is blank and an image is unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Inscription at the entrance of Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00517
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1860–1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3
Content: One of a series of draft introductions Whitman prepared for Leaves of Grass, but which were never printed during Whitman's lifetime. This particular introduction, composed entirely in verse, was reworked and revised multiple times. Though "Inscription at the entrance of Leaves of Grass" did not appear in print as a distinct and cohesive piece until collected by Clifton Joseph Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop (1928), portions of this draft were distilled into "One's-self I Sing," first published as "Inscription" in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman revised this poem before including it as "One's-self I Sing" in 1871, dropping some of the lines only to reintroduce them in "Sands at Seventy" (1888), under the title "Small the Theme of My Chant." Both "One's-self I Sing" and "Small the Theme of My Chant" appeared in the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass. Images of the versos are unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: To the Reader at the Entrance of Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00515
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1860–1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: One of a series of draft introductions Whitman prepared for Leaves of Grass, but which were never printed during Whitman's lifetime. This particular introduction, composed entirely in verse, was reworked and revised multiple times. Though "To the Reader at the Entrance of Leaves of Grass" did not appear in print as a distinct and cohesive piece until collected by Clifton Joseph Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop (1928), portions of this draft were distilled into "One's-self I Sing," first published as "Inscription" in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman revised this poem before including it as "One's-self I Sing" in 1871, dropping some of the lines only to reintroduce them in "Sands at Seventy" (1888), under the title "Small the Theme of My Chant." Both "One's-self I Sing" and "Small the Theme of My Chant" appeared in the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines from this manuscript were also revised and used in the poem, "So Long!," which first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: [The Epos of a Life]
Whitman Archive ID: dar.00001
Repository: Dartmouth College: The Rauner Special Collections Library
Date: about 1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This draft is related to "Inscription," the prefatory poem of the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass, which was later revised as "Small the Theme of My Chant." The smaller leaf, bearing a revised first line, was formerly pasted to the larger leaf. Other manuscripts held at the Library of Congress (Charles E. Feinberg Collection) and the New York Public Library (Oscar Lion Collection) open with the same revised line, though the published poem does not.



Whitman Archive Title: Inscription
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00010
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a draft of the poem "Inscription," which was first published in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. The poem was later revised and published as "One's-Self I Sing." In Leaves of Grass (1891–92), lines from this manuscript appear in both "One's-Self I Sing" and "Small the Theme of My Chant."



Whitman Archive Title: [The Epos of a Life]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00521
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1865–1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A cancelled poetry manuscript that is related to "Inscription," the prefatory poem of the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass, which was later revised as "Small the Theme of My Chant." Other manuscripts held at Dartmouth and the Library of Congress (Charles E. Feinberg) open with the same revised line, though the published poem does not. An image of the verso is unavailable.


So Long!

Whitman Archive Title: [To this continent comes the]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00275
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: 1856-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 10 x 13 cm pasted to 5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These lines share common ideas expressed throughout Leaves of Grass, especially in many of the new poems to the 1860 edition. The strongest verbal echoes appear in the poem "So long!" which expresses very similar ideas and the common words "menacing" and "offspring." The printed words "Leaves of" appearing on the verso indicate that Whitman composed this draft on a piece of paper cover from the 1855 edition.



Whitman Archive Title: Thought [Of these years I sing]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00189
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, leaf 1 21.5 x 13 cm, leaf 2 18.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Whitman inscribed and circled the note "2d/ piece/ in Book" in the upper-right corner of the first leaf. The small top section is inscribed on the verso of some deleted draft verses excised from "So Long!" "Thought" became section 9 of "Chants Democratic" in 1860. In the 1867 Leaves of Grass Whitman combined it with the second "Thought" to form the poem "Thoughts" in the supplement "Songs Before Parting." (This particular "Thought" was numbered section 1 of the composite poem.) In 1871 "Thoughts" appeared in the cluster "Songs of Parting" within the main body of Leaves of Grass, and in 1881, it achieved its final position within that cluster. These leaves correspond to the verses in the 1860 "Chants Democratic" version.



Whitman Archive Title: So Long!
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00232
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 9 leaves, 15 x 9 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
Content: Whitman numbered the leaves 75-81 in the upper right corner, with the exception of leaves 6 and 7, which are numbered at top center. In 1860 this was the final poem in Leaves of Grass; in 1867 Whitman cut twenty-one lines and transferred it to the end of the last Leaves of Grass supplement "Songs of Parting." In 1872, with the transformation of this supplement into the cluster "Songs Before Parting," it was permanently fixed as the final poem in the main body of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Inscription To the Reader at the entrance of Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00520
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1860–1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11
Content: One of a series of draft introductions Whitman prepared for Leaves of Grass, but which were never printed during his lifetime. This particular introduction, composed entirely in verse, was reworked and revised multiple times. Though "Inscription To the Reader at the entrance of Leaves of Grass" did not appear in print as a distinct and cohesive piece until collected by Clifton Joseph Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop (1928), portions of this draft were distilled into "One's-self I Sing," first published as "Inscription" in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman revised this poem before including it as "One's-self I Sing" in 1871, dropping some of the lines only to reintroduce them in "Sands at Seventy" (1888), under the title "Small the Theme of My Chant." Both "One's-self I Sing" and "Small the Theme of My Chant" appeared in the 1891-92 edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines from this manuscript were also revised and used in the poem "So Long!," which first appeared in the 1860-61 edition of Leaves of Grass. The verso of the last leaf is blank and an image is unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: To the Reader at the Entrance of Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00515
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1860–1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: One of a series of draft introductions Whitman prepared for Leaves of Grass, but which were never printed during Whitman's lifetime. This particular introduction, composed entirely in verse, was reworked and revised multiple times. Though "To the Reader at the Entrance of Leaves of Grass" did not appear in print as a distinct and cohesive piece until collected by Clifton Joseph Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop (1928), portions of this draft were distilled into "One's-self I Sing," first published as "Inscription" in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman revised this poem before including it as "One's-self I Sing" in 1871, dropping some of the lines only to reintroduce them in "Sands at Seventy" (1888), under the title "Small the Theme of My Chant." Both "One's-self I Sing" and "Small the Theme of My Chant" appeared in the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines from this manuscript were also revised and used in the poem, "So Long!," which first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 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
Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


Sobbing of the Bells, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Sobbing of the Bells
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00020
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: The Sobbing of the Bells (1881). A.MS. drafts.
Date: 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of "The Sobbing of the Bells," first published in the Boston Daily Globe on September 27, 1881. On the verso is a letter from John Boyle O'Reilly to Whitman that has been cut up and pasted together.



Whitman Archive Title: The Sobbing of the Bells
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00021
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: The Sobbing of the Bells (1881). A.MS. drafts.
Date: 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of "The Sobbing of the Bells," first published in 1881. On the verso is prose in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: The Sobbing of the Bells
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00075
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Box: Cased.
Date: 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Draft fragment of the poem "The Sobbing of the Bells," unsigned and dated midnight, Sept. 19-20, 1881. Included at the top of the manuscript is a note to Mr. Clarke regarding the setup and proof. The poem treats the death of President James Garfield and was first published in the Boston Daily Globe on September 27, 1881.



Whitman Archive Title: The Sobbing of the Bells
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00022
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: The Sobbing of the Bells (1881). A.MS. drafts.
Date: September 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of "The Sobbing of the Bells," first published in the Boston Daily Globe on September 27, 1881. The poem was composed sometime between September 19, 1881, when President James Garfield died, and the publication date. This clean draft is encased in mylar and housed with five clippings and descriptive cards.


Solid, Ironical, Rolling Orb

Whitman Archive Title: Camden - Phila
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00121
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS f 47
Date: 1884
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript which contains lines similar to those found at the beginning of "Additional Note, 1887, to English Edition 'Specimen Days.'" The note was originally titled "Additional Note. Written 1887 for the English Edition " and included in the second (English) edition of Specimen Days. The note would later be reprinted in Complete Prose Works. The date on the manuscript, however, indicates that it was written in 1884 and likely intended for inclusion in a proposed two-volume edition of poetry and prose to be published in 1884. The edition never materialized. On the reverse of the manuscript is a note by William Sloane Kennedy.


Some Fact-Romances

Whitman Archive Title: Poem incarnating the mind
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00346
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Some Personal and Old Age Jottings

Whitman Archive Title: The Van Velsors
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00334
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 125
Date: 1873
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes on the women of the Van Velsor family. Portions of this manuscript contributed to "Some Personal and Old-Age Jottings," Good-Bye My Fancy (1891).



Whitman Archive Title: Whitman, Walt, poet, was born May 31
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00382
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 10
Folder: 222
Date: 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Portions of this manuscript appeared in "Some Personal and Old-Age Jottings," first published in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891). Portions of this manuscript were also used in "Autobiographic Note. From an old 'remembrance copy,'" in Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman, May 31, 1889: Notes, Addresses, Letters, Telegrams (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1889).



Whitman Archive Title: [Had been simmering]
Whitman Archive ID: pri.00005
Repository: Princeton University Library: Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
Date: 1889–1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of "Some Personal and Old-Age Jottings," first published in the March 1891 issue of Lippincott's Magazine under the title, "Some Personal and Old-Age Memoranda." This prose piece remained largely unchanged between its first printing in Lippincott's and its appearance in Complete Prose (1892). However, the version published in Lippincott's includes a transcription of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 21 July 1855 letter in praise of Leaves of Grass, along with a short commentary on Emerson's relationship to Whitman—both of which Whitman did not include in Complete Prose. On the verso of this manuscript is a letter addressed to Whitman, dated 19 June 1889. Based on the date of this incoming letter and the date "Some Personal and Old-Age Jottings" was first published, this manuscript must have been composed between 1889–1891.



Whitman Archive Title: [The Bible Shakspere]
Whitman Archive ID: fol.00010
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library
Repository Title: Autograph notes by Walt Whitman [manuscript], 19th century.
Repository ID: Y.d.1036 (2)
Date: 1890-1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A list of authors and books, some with specific editors and editions noted. Many of the authors and books which appear on the list (including the specification of a certain edition) are included in an essay entitled "Some Personal and Old-Age Memoranda," in which Whitman offers a description of objects which can be found strewn about the floor of his Camden home, "some quite handsome editions, some half cover'd by dust, some within reach, evidently used." The piece first appeared in the March 1891 issue of Lippincott's Magazine, and was then reprinted in The Critic on 28 February 1891. It was later published under the title "Some Personal and Old-Age Jottings" in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) and Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [Probably we can give no]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05724
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 35
Folder: Prose."Personal and Old Age Memoranda" (Mar'91)
Date: about 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Partial draft of the essay published as "Some Personal and Old-Age Memoranda" in the March 1891 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. The leaf is made from a proof copy of "Autobiographic Note. From an old 'remembrance copy,'" which had appeared in Horace Traubel's 1889 volume Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman, to which is pasted an envelope addressed in the hand of Richard Maurice Bucke to Whitman. The essay was reprinted as "Some Personal and Old-Age Jottings" in the February 28, 1891 issue of The Critic, in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891), and in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Some War Memoranda

Whitman Archive Title: Hospital book 12
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04695
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Diaries, Diary Notes, and Address Books
Box: 1
Folder: Diaries, 1863–1864, hospital notebooks, (2 vols.)
Date: 1864
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 40 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
Content: A homemade notebook containing hospital and Civil War notes that Whitman recorded between February and May 1864. The entry which begins, "I find this in my notes" (see images 35, 36, and 38) was revised and used in "Some War Memoranda. Jotted Down at the Time," which appeared in North American Review (January 1887). This piece was reprinted in November Boughs (1888) before being collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). The entry which begins, "ah if it might prove" (see image 64) was used in Memoranda During the War (1875–1876) and again in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), in a piece describing Whitman's visit to an army camp hospital in Falmouth, Virginia, in December, 1862, titled "Down at the Front." The essay was later included in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Sometimes with One I Love

Whitman Archive Title: [Sometimes]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00328
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper (15 x 9.5 cm), in light brown ink, with one revision in the same ink. Pinholes at top and in center. A blue pencil mark, possibly the number 4, has been inscribed in the upper right corner. Bowers notes that the page bears the imprint of a papermaker's lozenge die, perhaps that of Platner and Smith of Lee, Massachusetts. This poem became section 39 of "Calamus" in 1860; in 1867 Whitman replaced the third line with a new one and permanently retitled the poem "Sometimes with One I Love."


Song at Sunset

Whitman Archive Title: 9th av.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00354
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Undated Thoughts, Ideas, and Trial lines (3 V.)
Date: between 1854 and 1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 45 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
Content: An early notebook Whitman used for various purposes. William White, in his edition of Whitman's Daybooks and Notebooks (New York: New York University Press, 1978. 3 vols.), noted a relationship between rough drafts of poems in this notebook (called "An Early Notebook" in White's edition) and the 1860 poem eventually titled "Starting from Paumanok." On surface 54 is a passage that seems to have contributed to the 1860 poem that became "Song at Sunset." On surface 85 is a passage that perhaps contributed to the 1855 poem later titled "Song of Myself," and a passage on surface 62 might have been used in the 1856 poem eventually titled "Miracles." Because Whitman wrote entries from both ends of the notebook, the writing on about half of the leaves is upside-down in relation to other leaves. Some leaves have become disbound, and their original positions are uncertain. Our ordering is based on the earliest known transcription, done by Fredson Bowers in 1955.



Whitman Archive Title: A Sunset Carol
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00188
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 6 leaves, leaf 1 25.5 x 12.5 cm, leaves 2-6 21.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Content: Whitman numbered each of the six leaves, in pencil, in the upper right corner. In the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass Whitman published this poem as section 8 of "Chants Democratic." In 1867, he gave it the permanent title "Song at Sunset" and moved it to the supplement "Songs Before Parting"; in 1871 it was finally transferred to the cluster "Songs of Parting" within the main body of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 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
Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


Song Dear to me the

Whitman Archive Title: [dear to me]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00171
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: Literary, Undated, The States and Their Resources
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: a draft line of poetry describing the land that is "dear" to the poet. Whitman had "Always the South" in mind as he composed the line, though this phrase was deleted.


Song for All Seas, All Ships

Whitman Archive Title: Sea Captains, Young or Old
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00006
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript is a signed draft of "Sea Captains, Young or Old," which was published first in the New York Daily Graphic on April 4, 1873. The poem was later retitled, "Song for All Seas, All Ships," and appeared in Two Rivulets, the companion volume to the 1876 Author's edition of Leaves of Grass.


Song for Occupations, A

Whitman Archive Title: you know how
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00142
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.



Whitman Archive Title: The most perfect wonders of
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00057
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: The most perfect wonders...
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Edward Grier writes of this manuscript that "[t]he sentiments and the handwriting are those of 1855 or earlier" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:186). Some of the language is similar to wording in the poems that would be titled "Song of Myself" and "A Song for Occupations." At some point, this manuscript formed part of Whitman's cultural geography scrapbook (owu.00090).



Whitman Archive Title: And to me each minute
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00057
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Song of Myself
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript includes lines that relate to the prose preface and to several of the poems in that edition, including the poems eventually titled "Song of Myself," "To Think of Time," and "A Song for Occupations." The manuscript also includes lines that relate to the manuscript poem "Pictures,"" which probably dates to the mid- to late 1850s. Notes about the arrangement and production of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass are written on the back of this manuscript.



Whitman Archive Title: Living Pictures
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00516
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Repository Title: "A Cluster of poems" and "Living Pictures"
Date: Before 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The handwriting and Whitman's use of the long "s" in several of the words suggest that this is an early manuscript. It is possible that these lines are early notes for the second poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "A Song for Occupations." This manuscript may also relate to yal.00081 ("Pictures"), a lengthy manuscript poem held at the Beinecke Library at Yale University that was probably written in the mid- to late-1850s. On the back of this leaf (uva.00086) is a list, almost certainly written later than the prose on the front, of subjects on which to write "a cluster of poems."



Whitman Archive Title: content to the ground
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00040
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: between 1845 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: The phrase "content to the ground," which is visually distinct from the other words on this leaf, appears in the poem eventually titled "Spontaneous Me." Some of the terms in the list at the bottom of the scrap were added to the poem eventually titled "A Song for Occupations" in 1856. In 1867, "blacksmithing" was also added, but two of the terms that are struck through on this manuscrpit ("saltmaking" and "arsenal") were dropped.



Whitman Archive Title: Talbot Wilson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00141
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 8
Folder: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, Notebooks, [1847], (80)
Date: Between 1847 and 1854
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 66 leaves, handwritten
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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: The Great Laws do not treasure chips
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00264
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 9
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript includes language similar to lines that appeared in two of the poems in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, later titled "A Song for Occupations" and "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?" On the reverse (duk.00905) are cancelled lines, beginning "hands are cut," which later appeared, in a revised form, in "Faces," which was originally published as the sixth untitled poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: I know as well as
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00051
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 5
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript draft treating ideas about divine revelation. Lines from this manuscript appear in the first poem in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. In its final version the poem was titled "Song of Myself," and the relevant lines appeared in section 41. The ideas and some of the language are also similar to other early manuscripts that relate to the second poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves, ultimately titled "A Song for Occupations," and part of a cluster titled "Debris" that appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass (see loc.00013, uva.00251, and duk.00261). The reverse (duk.00887) contains notes, dated March 20th '54, about the characters and physical traits of several men that Whitman met in his travels.



Whitman Archive Title: [Fa]bles, traditions, and
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00261
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 6
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The ideas and language in this manuscript relate to the first poem in 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself." This connection is reinforced by the supplied first line, added to a transcription of the manuscript that appears in Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899): "foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he was tried for forgery" (47). This line, which matches a line in the 1855 version of "Song of Myself," is not currently written on the manuscript. In language, ideas, and structure, the last few lines of this manuscript also resemble lines 39–43 in the untitled fourteenth poem of the "Debris" cluster of the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript is also similar to other early manuscripts that relate to these poems and to the second poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves, eventually titled "A Song for Occupations" (see loc.00013 ["Priests"], uva.00251 ["Do I not prove myself"], and duk.00051 ["I know as well as"]). The reverse (duk.00800) contains unrelated prose writing, including a line similar to one found in "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: My Spirit sped back to
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00262
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 7
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Some of the words and phrases in this manuscript appear in the first poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The manuscript also bears some resemblance to a line in the 1855 poem eventually titled "A Song for Occupations." The combination of "Love" and "Dilation or Pride" is also articulated in "Chants Democratic" (No. 4) in the 1860–1861 Leaves of Grass, later titled "Our Old Feuillage." The reverse contains one cancelled line: "Not one of the heroic guests."



Whitman Archive Title: I see who you are
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00263
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 8
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines, cancelled with a vertical strike, that appeared in the second poem of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "A Song for Occupations." The phrase "driver(s) of horses," a version of which appears in text added to a transcription of this manuscript in Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 31, appears in both the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and appears in its first poem, eventually titled "Song of Myself." On the reverse is one heavily corrected line whose relationship to the recto material or to any other published poem is uncertain.



Whitman Archive Title: Priests!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00013
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Priests! (1855). A.MS. draft.
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 10 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The general theme of this manuscript, as well as the specific wording of one of the lines, resembles a portion of the second poem in that edition, eventually entitled "A Song for Occupations": "When the sacred vessels or the bits of the eucharist, or the lath and plast, procreate as effectually as the young silvermiths or bakers, or the masons in their overalls / ... / I intend to reach them my hand and make as much of them as I do of men and women" (1855, p. 64). Language and ideas from this manuscript appear in other manuscripts that relate to the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, ultimately titled "Song of Myself." See in particular the lines: "The supernatural of no account . . . . myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes, / The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best, and be as prodigious, / Guessing when I am it will not tickle me much to receive puffs out of pulpit or print" (1855, p. 46). Based on its similarity to other manuscripts, this manuscript may also relate to lines 39-43 in "Debris," a cluster published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass: "I WILL take an egg out of the robin's nest in the orchard, / I will take a branch of gooseberries from the old bush in the garden, and go and preach to the world; / You shall see I will not meet a single heretic or scorner, / You shall see how I stump clergymen, and confound them, / You shall see me showing a scarlet tomato, and a white pebble from the beach" (1860, p. 424). On the verso (loc.07512) is a proposition for a poem "embodying the sentiment of perfect happiness." Pin marks and leftover bits of glue near the bottom of the leaf suggest it was at one point attached to something else.



Whitman Archive Title: The power by which the
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00029
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The imagery of this manuscript is echoed in several other manuscripts, as well as in a line of the opening poem of the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass—the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself" (see "you know how" [loc.00142], "I know a rich capitalist" [nyp.00129], and "the crowds naked in the" [nyp.00733]). These relationships suggest that this manuscript dates to early in 1855 or before. Edward Grier has observed that "the writing suggests a date in the 1850s" (see Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:136).



Whitman Archive Title: The crowds naked in the
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00733
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: Ms. leaf verso (The crowds naked in the bath...)
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, approximately 19.5 x 19 cm., handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript between 1850 and 1855, as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The phrase "attraction of gravity," used in this manuscript, was used twice in that edition, including in a line in the poem eventually titled "A Song for Occupations." The last line of the manuscript, about the mouse staggering infidels, appeared in a slightly revised form in the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." On the reverse (nyp.00078) are lines also used in that poem.



Whitman Archive Title: Do you know what music
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00088
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 4
Repository Title: An Essay on the Soul
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was preparing material for his first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. A portion of the first paragraph of the manuscript, dealing with music and its relationship to the soul, is similar to a passage in the poem eventually titled "A Song For Occupations." Other language in the manuscript is similar to the prose preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and to lines from the poems that would eventually be titled "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric."



Whitman Archive Title: Poem—a perfect school
Whitman Archive ID: tul.00011
Repository: University of Tulsa: Walt Whitman Ephemera
Box: 1
Folder: 2
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably written in about 1855. The proposed poem about "a perfect school" is not known to have been published, although words and sentiments that appear in this manuscript also appeared in the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." This manuscript's reference to "manly exercises" may also relate to a line in the poem eventually titled "A Song for Occupations."" On the back of this leaf (tul.00002) are draft lines that were used in the third poem in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "To Think of Time."



Whitman Archive Title: Do I not prove myself
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00251
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8 x 18.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. In language, ideas, and structure, the manuscript most closely resembles lines 39–43 in "Debris," a poem published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. However, the ideas and some of the language are also similar to other early manuscripts that relate to the first and second poems in the 1855 edition of Leaves, ultimately titled "Song of Myself" and "A Song for Occupations" (see "Priests" [loc.00013], "I know as well as" [duk.00051], and "[Fa]bles, traditions" [duk.00261]). In his transcription of this manuscript, Richard Maurice Bucke combines it with "I ask nobody's faith" (nyp.00102), but the manuscripts do not appear to be continuous (Notes and Fragments [London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899], 25). Poetic lines written on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00568) appeared in the poem eventually titled ""Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: Asia
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00886
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 14
Date: About 1855 or 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains notes and draft lines that are related to a poem published first as "Poem of Salutation" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass and later as "Salut Au Monde!" Whitman's use of the word "tabounshic" in this manuscript is unusual. He used it (spelled "tabounschik") only in the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass in the poem eventually titled "A Song for Occupations." In other respects, however, that poem does not appear to be related to these notes. The reverse side of the leaf (duk.00030) contains draft lines of the poem that was eventually titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore."



Whitman Archive Title: The regular old followers
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00024
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks c. 1854–1855
Date: Between 1853 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 12 leaves, handwritten
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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: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 7
Folder: Photocopies Notebooks [before 1855]
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 31 leaves, handwritten
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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: I know a rich capitalist
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00129
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Emory Holloway has pointed out that Whitman's reference to the sinking of the San Francisco indicates that this notebook, "or at least part of it, is later than 1853." He writes that "it was probably begun in 1854" because the "marble church" in the first passage presumably refers to the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, "which was not completed until then." See Holloway, "A Whitman Manuscript," American Mercury 3 (December 1924), 475–480. See also Andrew C. Higgins, "Art and Argument: The Rise of Walt Whitman's Rhetorical Poetics, 1838-1855," PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1999; and Edward F. Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:128–135. Of the notebook passages that can be identified with published works, most represent early versions of images and phrases from the 1855 poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." One passage clearly contributed to the 1856 poem later titled "Song of the Open Road." Others are possibly connected to the poems eventually titled "A Song for Occupations" and "Great Are the Myths," both first published in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and to the preface for that volume. One passage seems to have contributed to the 1860–1861 poem that Whitman later titled "Our Old Feuillage." One passage is similar to a line in a long manuscript poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures". The first several lines of that poem (not including the line in question) were revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880 and then in Leaves of Grass as part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster (1881–1882, p. 310). No image of the outside back cover of the notebook is available because it has been stitched into a larger volume.



Whitman Archive Title: A cluster of poems
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00086
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 19
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: About 1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19.5 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains notes for a cluster of poems that Whitman characterizes as being "in the same way as 'Calamus Leaves' expressing the idea and sentiment of Happiness . . . " Whitman's use of the title "Calamus Leaves" on the opposite side, as in some very similar notes currently housed at Duke University, point toward the 1860 cluster "Enfans d'Adam" and dates the notes to some point in the late spring of 1859. On the reverse side of the leaf (uva.00516) are lines that perhaps constitute early notes for the second poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, a poem that would eventually be titled "A Song for Occupations."



Whitman Archive Title: I cannot guess what the
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00079
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines do not have any known direct relation to Whitman's published poetry. At one point, however, the manuscript was almost certainly part of "The Great Laws do not" (duk.00264), which includes draft lines that appeared in that edition. On the back of this leaf (tex.00321) is a partial draft of the poem eventually titled "Faces." Both manuscript drafts were probably originally continuous with manuscript drafts on the leaf from which this leaf was cut.



Whitman Archive Title: [George Walker]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00143
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 37
Folder: 1855-1856, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry trial lines
Date: between 1855-1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 45 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:226–243, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Starting from Paumanok," "A Song for Occupations," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Salut au Monde!," "To One Shortly to Die," and "A Woman Waits for Me."



Whitman Archive Title: [Iron works]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00021
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1855–1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Prose notes and poetic lines that relate to "A Song for Occupations," which first appeared in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, under the title "Poem of the Daily Work of the Workmen and Workwomen of These States." The title of this poem shifted throughout the editions of Leaves of Grass, and included the following variants: "Chants Democratic," "The Workingmen," and "Carol of Occupations." Whitman finally settled on the title, "A Song for Occupations," in the 1881–1882 edition. The line, "The forge-fires in the mountains...the men around, feeling the melt with huge crowbars" appeared slightly revised in both early and late versions of this poem. Other ideas detailed in the prose portion of this manuscript can be found in this poem; however, the connection of this manuscript to Whitman's published prose work is unclear.


Song for Sweet Water, A

Whitman Archive Title: A Song for Sweet Water
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00361
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 1
Folder: A Song for Sweet Water
Date: July, 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 cm x 21.5 cm, handwritten
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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.


Song in Poem of Kisses

Whitman Archive Title: In Poem Song of kisses
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00302
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Date: Before 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 7.5 cm x 11.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript may relate to "Poem of Kisses" (uva.00301). Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates it before 1860 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1345).


Song of Joys, A

Whitman Archive Title: Poem incarnating the mind
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00346
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks, Before 1855
Date: Before 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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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: whale—the sperm
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07550
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: The voice of Walt Whitman
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: One leaf made by pasting together two scraps of pink paper, probably wrappers from the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. This portion of the manuscript contains several fragmentary lines written in pencil and describing a whale hunt. The lines are probably related to lines on the same topic in "A Song of Joys," first published as "Poem of Joys" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. In the 1867 edition the poem was divided into numbered sections and retitled "Poems of Joy," before resuming its original title in the Passage to India section of the 1871–72 edition. It took its final title in the 1881–82 edition. This scrap is attached to another scrap (loc.06005) that contains a title ("Poem of the Trainer") written in ink. On the reverse side of the leaf (loc.06006) are approximately four lines, written and revised in ink, that may be related to the poem "Year of Meteors. (1859–1860)."



Whitman Archive Title: The genuine miracles of Christ
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01019
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "The Genuine Miracles of Christ," draft
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This cancelled prose manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855. Language in the manuscript was used in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." Segments of the manuscript also resemble language that appeared in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and in the 1856 "Poem of Perfect Miracles," later titled "Miracles." The wording of "the vast elemental sympathy, which, only the human soul is capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods," was used, slightly revised, in "A Song of Joys," which first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as "Poem of Joys."



Whitman Archive Title: Perfect serenity of mind
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00044
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 194
Date: Before 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: A fragment of several lines, apparently written before publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. One of the lines was included in the 1860 "Poem of Joys," which was later entitled "A Song of Joys."



Whitman Archive Title: Poem of the Universalities
Whitman Archive ID: med.00735
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Notes, apparently written as two paragraphs, which record ideas for a poem or poems. A transcription of this manuscript, the current location of which is unknown, was published by Richard Maurice Bucke in Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 142. The last two phrases of this manuscript were used in the "Poem of Joys," first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass: "The memory of only one look—the boy lingering and waiting" (p. 261). The poem was retitled "Poems of Joy" in the 1867 edition. In 1871, when the poem appeared in the volume Passage to India, this line had been deleted and the original title restored. Some copies of the 1871–1872 edition of Leaves of Grass include the sheets from that volume. In subsequent editions, the poem was retitled "A Song of Joys."



Whitman Archive Title: [mark the figure]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01032
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "Mark the Figure," draft
Date: about 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two scraps pasted together to make one leaf. Lines from this manuscript were revised and used in "A Song of Joys," which first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, as "Poem of Joys."



Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Joys
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00218
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 20 leaves, 14.5 x 13 cm to 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
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Content: These twenty leaves, numbered by a collector, relate to "Poem of Joys," first published in the 1860 Leaves of Grass. The title became "Poems of Joy" in 1867, but reverted to the original title in its next two iterations (in the "Passage to India" supplement of 1872 and 1876). In 1881 it was finally titled "A Song of Joys" and left independent of any cluster.



Whitman Archive Title: After the Supper and Talk
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00082
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 2
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25 x 20 cm, handwritten
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Content: A draft of "After the Supper and Talk". This poem was rejected by Harper's in 1885 but published in Lippincott's Magazine in November 1887, after which it eventually became the final poem in the "First Annex" titled "Sands at Seventy." To the verso are pasted sections 16 and 18-19 of "Poem of Joys" (final title: "A Song of Joys") clipped either from the independent book Passage to India (1871) or from the "Passage to India" supplement to Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: So Loth to Depart!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00003
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: After the Supper and Talk (1888). A.MS. drafts
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 26 x 20 cm, handwritten
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Content: Draft of poem later revised and published as "After the Supper and Talk" in 1887. On verso detached from Leaves of Grass, part of "Poem of Joys," first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, and later published as "A Song of Joys." The title "Poem of Joys" is in Whitman's hand.


Song of Myself

Whitman Archive Title: to enjoy the Panorama
Whitman Archive ID: amh.00008
Repository: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Date: about 1850
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: The handwriting on this draft fragment indicates that it was written fairly early, probably before the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855. Most of the fragment describes a moving panorama, a popular form of entertainment during the antebellum period. The juxtaposition Whitman sets up in this manuscript (of painted panorama to actual landscape) appears in a line published in the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass, from the poem that would later be titled "Song of Myself": "The panorama of the sea . . . . but the sea itself?"



Whitman Archive Title: Outdoors is the best antiseptic
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00297
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 32
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This prose fragment extols the virtues of outdoor living and the appeal of physical laborers who work outdoors. Similar ideas are found throughout Leaves of Grass. The following lines in the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself" echoes the first two sentences of this manuscript: "I am enamoured of growing outdoors, / Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, / Of the builders and steerers of ships, of the wielders of axes and mauls, of the drivers of horses" (1855, p. 21). The first part of this prose fragment also may relate to the following line from the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass: "The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people" (p. v). The transcription of the manuscript published in Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 152, includes additional text not now present in the manuscript that may also connect it to the following line in the poem eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric": "Do you think they are not there because they are not expressed in parlors and lecture-rooms?" (1855, p. 81). Edward Grier claims that this manuscript was, at one time, pinned together with another manuscript (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:169; see duk.00296).



Whitman Archive Title: Lofty sirs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00387
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 31
Folder: before 1855, "I Am a Born Democrat," draft
Date: Between 1840 and 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Edward Grier concludes that this manuscript was likely written before 1855 because of its similarity to several of the notebooks that Whitman wrote from that period (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2110). Ideas in this manuscript are similar to ideas in the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself," and lines and phrases from the manuscript appear in another manuscript that may have contributed to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself": see "I know many beautiful things" (tex.00031.html). The tone of the statements is also consistent with Whitman's early journalistic and editorial persona. Ideas and words from this manuscript are also similar to ideas and words that appeared in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. There is also a chance this manuscript relates to language in a Whitman-authored review of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, titled "Walt Whitman and His Poems," originally published in the United States Review. An image of the reverse of this manuscript is currently unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Poem incarnating the mind
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00346
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks, Before 1855
Date: Before 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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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: Will you have the walls
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00085
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was preparing material for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The ideas and language in the last section of the manuscript may relate to the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The first part of this manuscript resembles a line in the fifth poem of that edition, eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric." The leaf looks like it may have been extracted from a notebook. On the reverse (nyp.00549) is prose writing that contains several phrases similar to some found in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself," as well as later poems.



Whitman Archive Title: Of this broad and majestic
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00549
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two phrases and images from this manuscript appear, slightly altered, in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that would later be titled "Song of Myself." The manuscript was therefore probably written before or early in 1855. In the manuscript Whitman has added the phrase "the timothy and the clover" to a description of plants growing in a field. On page 18 of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass Whitman describes jumping from the crossbeams of a barn into the hay and says he will "seize the clover and timothy." Later in the manuscript he writes of "the buckwheat and its white tops and the bees that hum there all day," and on page 36 of the 1855 Leaves he writes of the "white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and a buzzer there with the rest." A similar line concerning buckwheat and bees appeared in the poem "Come Up From the Fields Father," and a reference to "clover and timothy" appeared in "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun." Both poems were first published in Drum-Taps in 1865. "Clover and timothy" also appears in the poem "The Return of the Heroes," which was first published in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. On the reverse of this manuscript (nyp.00085) are poetic lines, one of which appeared in the poem ultimately titled "I Sing the Body Electric."



Whitman Archive Title: poet of Materialism
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00104
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 44
Date: 1855 or earlier
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: Manuscript expressing a belief in the continuing "amelioration" of the earth and humankind, written on a scrap of wallpaper. Although it is cast in prose, this may be an early draft of a group of lines, expressing similar thoughts, in "Great Are the Myths," which was first published as the final, untitled, poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. It also bears some resemblance to lines that appeared in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." Whitman continued to revise the poem in later editions of Leaves of Grass. In the 1881–1882 edition, Whitman removed "Great Are the Myths" from Leaves of Grass altogether, except for four lines, which he titled "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night."



Whitman Archive Title: No doubt the efflux of the soul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00025
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Undated Thoughts, Ideas, and Trial lines (3 V.)
Date: Before 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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Content: This notebook consists almost entirely of prose. However, the ideas and language developed throughout the notebook can be linked to a number of poems that appeared in Leaves of Grass, including "Song of Myself," "Great are the Myths" (ultimately shortened to a few lines and titled "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night"), "Faces," "The Sleepers," and "To Think of Time," versions of which appeared in Leaves of Grass in 1855. One manuscript passage is similar to a passage in the preface to the 1855 edition. Thus, this notebook was almost certainly written before that date. Content from the first several paragraphs of this notebook was also used slightly revised in "Song of the Open Road," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves as "Poem of the Road."



Whitman Archive Title: you know how
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00142
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 8
Folder: Notebooks, [Before 1855]
Date: 1855 or before
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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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.



Whitman Archive Title: is wider than the west
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00510
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This draft fragment includes phrases and poetic lines that were revised and used in different editions of Leaves of Grass. "The orbed opening of whose mouth," struck through on this manuscript, is suggestive of a line that appeared in 1855 in the poem ultimately called "Song of Myself": "The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full." The line "Nature is rude at first—but once begun never tires" was used slightly altered in "Song of the Open Road," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass under the title "Poem of the Road." Edward Grier, drawing from Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments (1899), adds a bracketed conclusion to the last line: "Most works of art [tire. Only the Great Chef d'OEuvres never tire and never dazzle at first.]" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:168). The line does not currently appear on the manuscript. On the reverse of this manuscript is a prose fragment on the subject of knowledge and learning (nyp.00024).



Whitman Archive Title: The most perfect wonders of
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00057
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: The most perfect wonders...
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: Edward Grier writes of this manuscript that "[t]he sentiments and the handwriting are those of 1855 or earlier" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:186). Some of the language is similar to wording in the poems that would be titled "Song of Myself" and "A Song for Occupations." At some point, this manuscript formed part of Whitman's cultural geography scrapbook (owu.00090).



Whitman Archive Title: [I can tell of the long besieged city]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00511
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: I can tell of the long besieged city
Date: 1845–1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A scrap of paper with poetic lines that were used in revised form in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines contained in this manuscript were eventually used in the poem ultimately titled "Song of Myself." On the verso of this scrap is a prose fragment with no known connection to Whitman's published work.



Whitman Archive Title: And to me each minute
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00057
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Song of Myself
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript includes lines that relate to the prose preface and to several of the poems in that edition, including the poems eventually titled "Song of Myself," "To Think of Time," and "A Song for Occupations." The manuscript also includes lines that relate to the manuscript poem "Pictures,"" which probably dates to the mid- to late 1850s. Notes about the arrangement and production of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass are written on the back of this manuscript.



Whitman Archive Title: Man, before the rage of
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00287
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Before 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: Although they are written in free verse, both the conventional nature of these lines and the handwriting suggest an early date of inscription. This draft may be a continuation of duk.00018 ("There is no word in"), suggesting it may relate to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." The lines, especially the first and third, also bear some resemblance to a passage of the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and to lines in what eventually became section 6 of "I Sing the Body Electric."



Whitman Archive Title: For example, whisper
Whitman Archive ID: med.00726
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Because this manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances or date of its composition, but based on the content it seems likely that it was written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was composing his first edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript note about the "superb wonder of a blade of grass" may relate to similar statements in the prose preface and the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." In Notes and Fragments, Richard Maurice Bucke transcribes the manuscript with "Enter into the thoughts of" (nyp.00112) and describes it as "a very early note, the paper torn and almost falling to pieces." The date of the manuscript is almost certainly before 1855.



Whitman Archive Title: For remember that behind all
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05334
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Date: Between 1845 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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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: Talbot Wilson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00141
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 8
Folder: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, Notebooks, [1847], (80)
Date: Between 1847 and 1854
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 66 leaves, handwritten
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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: How gladly we leave the
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00296
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 32
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: The description of "boatmen" with "trowsers tucked in their boots" in this manuscript appears to be related to lines in the opening poem of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself": "The boatmen and clamdiggers arose early and stopped for me, / I tucked my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time". The phrase "real men and women refreshing, hearty, and wicked" may relate to the following line, which occurs later in the same poem: "Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing and wicked and real." These connections suggest a date before or early in 1855. Edward Grier claims that this manuscript was, at one time, pinned together with another manuscript (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:169; see duk.00297).



Whitman Archive Title: My hand will not hurt what
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00254
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines in the manuscript are similar to lines that appear in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The numbers written on the manuscript, along with remnants of paste and binding tape along the margin, suggest that the page likely came from a notebook. Lines similar to the last several in this manuscript were also reworked in the notebook "Talbot Wilson" (loc.00141). Notes written on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00601) also relate to lines in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: cottonwood
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00601
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines in the manuscript are similar to lines in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The list of flora and fauna could anticipate any number of similar lists in Whitman's writing, but has perhaps the most words in common with a line in the prose preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. Poetic lines on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00254) also relate to lines in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: It is no miracle now
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00007
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 3
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript draft may have contributed to lines in the poem that eventually would be titled "Song of Myself," which first appeared in Leaves of Grass (1855). The clearest relation is to the line: "A minute and a drop of me settle my brain" (1855, p. 33), but the lines about touch and death also relate to ideas in sections 6 and 27-30 of the final version of the poem. In the 1856 edition it was titled "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American," and Whitman shortened the title to "Walt Whitman" in 1860–1861. The final title, "Song of Myself," was not introduced until the 1881–1882 edition of Leaves. The reverse side of the leaf (duk.00797 contains prose writing related to a different section of the same poem.



Whitman Archive Title: Light and air
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00260
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 4
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Language from the manuscript appears in the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The phrase "light and air" also appears in the fourth poem of that edition, eventually titled "The Sleepers." The supplied first line, beginning "Under this rank coverlid," was added to a transcription of the manuscript that appears in Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 16. The line is not currently written on the manuscript.



Whitman Archive Title: I know as well as
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00051
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 5
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: A manuscript draft treating ideas about divine revelation. Lines from this manuscript appear in the first poem in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. In its final version the poem was titled "Song of Myself," and the relevant lines appeared in section 41. The ideas and some of the language are also similar to other early manuscripts that relate to the second poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves, ultimately titled "A Song for Occupations," and part of a cluster titled "Debris" that appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass (see loc.00013, uva.00251, and duk.00261). The reverse (duk.00887) contains notes, dated March 20th '54, about the characters and physical traits of several men that Whitman met in his travels.



Whitman Archive Title: [Fa]bles, traditions, and
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00261
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 6
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: The ideas and language in this manuscript relate to the first poem in 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself." This connection is reinforced by the supplied first line, added to a transcription of the manuscript that appears in Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899): "foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he was tried for forgery" (47). This line, which matches a line in the 1855 version of "Song of Myself," is not currently written on the manuscript. In language, ideas, and structure, the last few lines of this manuscript also resemble lines 39–43 in the untitled fourteenth poem of the "Debris" cluster of the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript is also similar to other early manuscripts that relate to these poems and to the second poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves, eventually titled "A Song for Occupations" (see loc.00013 ["Priests"], uva.00251 ["Do I not prove myself"], and duk.00051 ["I know as well as"]). The reverse (duk.00800) contains unrelated prose writing, including a line similar to one found in "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: There is no word in
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00018
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: Trent II-7, 201
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript features drafts of lines and ideas that appeared, in a revised form, in the first poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, ultimately titled "Song of Myself." The drafted lines relate to the portions of the poem that ultimately became sections 48 and 49. This manuscript has been mounted and framed with a prose fragment, dealing with the soul and nature, and a photograph of Whitman. An image of the verso is unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: My Spirit sped back to
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00262
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 7
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: Some of the words and phrases in this manuscript appear in the first poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The manuscript also bears some resemblance to a line in the 1855 poem eventually titled "A Song for Occupations." The combination of "Love" and "Dilation or Pride" is also articulated in "Chants Democratic" (No. 4) in the 1860–1861 Leaves of Grass, later titled "Our Old Feuillage." The reverse contains one cancelled line: "Not one of the heroic guests."



Whitman Archive Title: I see who you are
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00263
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 8
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: Draft lines, cancelled with a vertical strike, that appeared in the second poem of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "A Song for Occupations." The phrase "driver(s) of horses," a version of which appears in text added to a transcription of this manuscript in Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 31, appears in both the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and appears in its first poem, eventually titled "Song of Myself." On the reverse is one heavily corrected line whose relationship to the recto material or to any other published poem is uncertain.



Whitman Archive Title: To be at all
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00001
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 2
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript contains a draft of the following lines in the first poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, a poem that was later titled "Song of Myself": "To be in any form, what is that? / If nothing lay more developed the quahaug and its callous shell were enough. / Mine is no callous shell, / I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop, / They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me" (1855, p. 32). On the reverse side (duk.00883) are notes, trial lines, and lists of words and phrases related to what eventually became sections 24 and 49 of "Song of Myself" and to lines included in "The Sleepers." Both poems were first published in the 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: And I have discovered them
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00006
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 1
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: The draft lines on one side of the manuscript leaf contributed to the opening poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. In the poem's final version, "Song of Myself," these lines are found in section 48. The poem was first titled "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American" in the 1856 edition, and Whitman shortened the title to "Walt Whitman" in 1860–1861. The final title was not introduced until the 1881–1882 edition of Leaves. It is not known whether the prose on the leaf's reverse (see duk.00003) is related to any of Whitman's published work; however, physical and thematic similarities with "And I have discovered them by night and by," above, and "My tongue can never be content with harness," below, make a connection with the 1860 poem "Unnamed Lands" likely.



Whitman Archive Title: My tongue can never be
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00008
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 1
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: On one side of the manuscript leaf are draft poetic lines similar in topic to lines from the opening poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, later titled "Song of Myself." The use of horse-related terms—"harness," "traces," "the bit"—may relate to the extended metaphor developed in following lines: "Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture fields, / Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away, / They bribed to swap off with touch, and go and graze at the edges of me, / No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger, / Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them awhile, / Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me" (1855, pp. 32–33). The prose drafted on the reverse includes ideas and phrases that resemble those used in "Unnamed Lands," a poem published first in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Remembrances I plant American ground
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00029
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 27
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: The draft poetic lines in this manuscript includes some language similar to wording in the first and final poems in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself" and "Great are the Myths." On the reverse (duk.00884) is a list of rivers, lakes, and cities that likely contributed to "Poem of Salutation" in the 1856 edition of Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: A man of gigantic
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00293
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 32
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: Prose fragment containing words and ideas similar to segments of the 1855 poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." Edward Grier also connects the image of the heroic male and the "flowing grandeur of a man" to the poems that make up the 1855 Leaves (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:178). On the reverse is another prose fragment (duk.00888) dealing with the importance of independent thinking amid social forces of law and custom, as well as describing the attributes of a "perfect" man.



Whitman Archive Title: Remember that the clock and
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00298
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 32
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A prose manuscript dealing mainly with conceptions of time and which may have contributed to the following line in the first poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (eventually titled "Song of Myself"): "The clock indicates the moment . . . . but what does eternity indicate?" The last few lines of the manuscript contain ideas and phrases similar to another passage of the same poem. The manuscript's likening of "God" or "the soul" to an "Elder Brother" is reminescent of lines "And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own, / And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own." These correspondences suggest a date of before or early in 1855.



Whitman Archive Title: The most superb beauties
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00304
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 33
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes, or possibly trial lines, expressing the idea that the highest beauty is found in what is "cheapest" and "commonest," probably connected to a line in the first poem of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, ultimately titled "Song of Myself". In the final version of the poem, the line appears in section 14. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "It seems to me," "What shall the great poet be then?" and "Make no quotations."



Whitman Archive Title: In metaphysical points
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00159
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 67
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The wording and general idea of this prose manuscript anticipates lines in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: myself to celebrate
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00787
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript containing drafts of lines used in the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself," including the poem's famous opening line, "I celebrate myself." On the reverse is a prose manuscript (duk.00879) with an unknown connection to Whitman's published work. This manuscript has been bound, seemingly by a collector, with a printer's copy of the 1881–1882 edition of Leaves of Grass that contains numerous handwritten corrections by Whitman (duk.00098).



Whitman Archive Title: It were unworthy a live man to pray
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00162
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 203
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An early scrap of prose material similar to parts of "Song of Myself," which first appeared as the opening poem in Leaves of Grass (1855). The manuscript's final three lines may have contributed to what became section 32, in which Whitman describes wanting to "live awhile with animals" because "[t]hey do not sweat and whine about their condition, / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins." These lines were present in the first version of the poem in 1855, suggesting a date of before or early in that year.



Whitman Archive Title: It is the endless delusion
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00800
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 6
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This prose manuscript includes a thought similar to one from the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." Whitman writes that "The noble soul steadily rejects any liberty or privilege or wealth that is not open on the same terms to every other man and every other woman." This idea is phrased more memorably in the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass—"By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms" (29)—suggesting a date for the manuscript of 1855 or earlier. Other ideas and words from this manuscript are similar to ideas and words that appeared in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. See, for instance, the line: "the melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to the toss and pallor of years of moneymaking with all their scorching days and icy nights and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or infinitessimals of parlors, or shameless stuffing while others starve . . " (1855, p. x). The reverse (duk.00261) contains ideas and language related to what eventually became section 41 of "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: Give us men
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00877
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is an adaptation of notes Whitman took about Egypt, almost certainly based on his reading of Sir John Gardner Wilkinson's Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1837). Related information about Sesostris appears on page 29 of the first volume in Wilkinson's collection, though Whitman may have been reading a different edition. Whitman used the information in his article "One of the Lessons Bordering Broadway: The Egyptian Museum," published in Life Illustrated on December 8, 1855. Similar descriptions of Sesostris appear in several of Whitman's other notes and manuscripts, including "Immortality was realized" (mid.00018) and "Abraham's visit to Egypt" (tex.00200) two sets of manuscript notes about Egypt that Edward Grier dates to between 1855 and 1860 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 5:1922; 6:2022); the notebook "women" (loc.05589); and the poetic rendition "Advance shapes like his shape" (tex.00028). The manuscript is pasted to a larger document along with another scrap, the reverse of which (duk.00878) features prose notes that relate to what became section 2 of "I Sing the Body Electric," first published as the fifth poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Both manuscripts were probably written shortly before or early in 1855, though the notes on the backing sheet to which they have been pasted may have been written at a later date.



Whitman Archive Title: Sweet flag
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00883
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: Song of Myself (Autograph MS, draft portions) To be at all...
Repository ID: MS q 2
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. This manuscript, filled with suggestive words and phrases, appears to have contributed to the first and fourth poems in the volume, eventually titled "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers," respectively. The phrase the phrase "polished melons" is reminiscent of the line "I reach to the leafy lips . . . . I reach to the polished breasts of melons" in "Song of Myself," and the list in this manuscript may relate to the following line: "Root of washed sweet-flag, timorous pond-snipe, nest of guarded duplicate eggs, it shall be you." Other elements of this manuscript appear to have contributed to "The Sleepers." The jotting "I am a look / mystic / in a trance/ exaltation" may have led to the line "I am a dance . . . . Play up there! the fit is whirling me fast." Further, the reference to the soothing hand is perhaps an early version of the passage in which the narrator, who stands "with drooping eyes by the worstsuffering and restless," passes his "hands soothingly to and fro a few inches from them." Finally, the passage about "Sap that flows from the end of the manly maple" (associated in the manuscript with the "tooth of delight" and "tooth prong") probably contributed to the following passage in the same poem: "The white teeth stay, and the boss-tooth advances in darkness, / And liquor is spilled on lips and bosoms by touching glasses, and the best liquor afterward." These lines were removed from the final versioen of the poem. The writing on the reverse side of the leaf (duk.00001) contributed to a different part of the poem that became "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: The wild gander leads his
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00507
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 20
Folder: L of G (1855). Manuscript Page.
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855, while Whitman was working on the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines in the manuscript appear in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." John C. Broderick has described this manuscript as the last surviving page of "the original manuscript of the first edition of Leaves of Grass" ("The Greatest Whitman Collector and the Greatest Whitman Collection," The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 27.2 [April 1970], 109–128), a claim echoed by Arthur Golden in "The Ending of the 1855 Version of 'Song of Myself,'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 3.4 (Spring 1986), 30n6. The page number at the top of the manuscript is not inconsistent with the possible positioning of these lines as part of a printer's copy, but lacking further evidence it would be difficult to confirm the claim. On the reverse side (loc.07428) is a long list of words, many of which are found in the poem eventually "Song of the Broad-Axe."



Whitman Archive Title: Priests!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00013
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Priests! (1855). A.MS. draft.
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 10 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The general theme of this manuscript, as well as the specific wording of one of the lines, resembles a portion of the second poem in that edition, eventually entitled "A Song for Occupations": "When the sacred vessels or the bits of the eucharist, or the lath and plast, procreate as effectually as the young silvermiths or bakers, or the masons in their overalls / ... / I intend to reach them my hand and make as much of them as I do of men and women" (1855, p. 64). Language and ideas from this manuscript appear in other manuscripts that relate to the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, ultimately titled "Song of Myself." See in particular the lines: "The supernatural of no account . . . . myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes, / The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best, and be as prodigious, / Guessing when I am it will not tickle me much to receive puffs out of pulpit or print" (1855, p. 46). Based on its similarity to other manuscripts, this manuscript may also relate to lines 39-43 in "Debris," a cluster published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass: "I WILL take an egg out of the robin's nest in the orchard, / I will take a branch of gooseberries from the old bush in the garden, and go and preach to the world; / You shall see I will not meet a single heretic or scorner, / You shall see how I stump clergymen, and confound them, / You shall see me showing a scarlet tomato, and a white pebble from the beach" (1860, p. 424). On the verso (loc.07512) is a proposition for a poem "embodying the sentiment of perfect happiness." Pin marks and leftover bits of glue near the bottom of the leaf suggest it was at one point attached to something else.



Whitman Archive Title: And I say the stars
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00042
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Song of Myself (1855). A.MS. draft.
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines are similar to lines in the first and third poems in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself" and "To Think of Time." Similar draft lines also appear in "Talbot Wilson," an early notebook (loc.00141). On the verso (loc.07869) is a draft of a piece of journalism published on October 20, 1854.



Whitman Archive Title: The genuine miracles of Christ
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01019
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "The Genuine Miracles of Christ," draft
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This cancelled prose manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855. Language in the manuscript was used in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." Segments of the manuscript also resemble language that appeared in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and in the 1856 "Poem of Perfect Miracles," later titled "Miracles." The wording of "the vast elemental sympathy, which, only the human soul is capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods," was used, slightly revised, in "A Song of Joys," which first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as "Poem of Joys."



Whitman Archive Title: In his presence
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00483
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: Between 1850 and 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: Whitman probably inscribed the material in this notebook in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Some of Whitman's language about the poet and religion in this notebook is similar to the language and ideas used in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Content from leaf 10 verso (see twentieth image) was revised and used in "The Sleepers," the poem eventually titled "The Sleepers," which first appeared in Leaves of Grass (1855), including the following lines: "Now the vast dusk bulk that is the whale's bulk . . . . it seems mine, / Warily, sportsman! though I lie so sleepy and sluggish, my tap is death" (1855, p. 74). The passage likely also relates to the following lines in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself": "How the flukes splash! / How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!" (1855, p. 48). Content from leaf 13 recto (see twenty-fifth image) may relate to other sections of the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: See'st thou
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00162
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: Literary, Undated, The Voice of Walt Whitman.
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. It probably relates to the seventh poem in that edition, originally untitled, part of which eventually became "Song of the Answerer." The manuscript is collected in a bound volume with other manuscripts.



Whitman Archive Title: I last winter observed the
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00022
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett suggest that the mention of a "wild-drake" may connect this scrap to the line about a "wood-drake" in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself" (Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition, ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley [New York: New York University Press, 1965]). However, nothing else about the words in this manuscript suggest a connection to that line. The appearance of the paper, ink, and the letter forms do correspond with those in other pre-1855 manuscripts.



Whitman Archive Title: To pass existence is so
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00052
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The draft line is similar in subject to lines used in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The numbering, paper, and ink are also similar to other manuscripts that feature lines that appeared in that poem. On the reverse are lines that were possibly also written as part of the process for the creation of that poem (see nyp.00732).



Whitman Archive Title: What would it bring you
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00732
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Although these lines do not appear in the versions of the poems included in that edition, the numbering, paper, and ink are similar to other manuscripts with lines used in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself."" A draft line of poetry written on the back of this manuscript (nyp.00052) also may relate to that poem.



Whitman Archive Title: The fester of defeat sharper
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00023
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The last few lines of the manuscript are drafts of lines used in the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: Superb and infinitely manifold as
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00063
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: Holograph notes for lectures and poems; 12 notes written on 14 pieces of paper, unsigned, undated.
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The discussion of the vastness of time and space is similar to a passage from the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The manuscript includes the phrase "countless octillions of the cubic leagues of space," while a phrase from the version of the poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass reads "a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span" (51). Whether or not this manuscript contributed directly to the poem, the similarity suggests that the manuscript was written before or early in 1855. Edward Grier includes two additional sentences in his transcription of this manuscript that are taken from Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments (see Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:161). However, the source of Bucke's transcription have not been found and there is no evidence that the sentences were ever associated with the present manuscript.



Whitman Archive Title: Enter into the thoughts of
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00112
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: Enter into the thoughts of the different theological faiths
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript was likely written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was preparing materials for the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The idea of "[e]nter[ing] into the thoughts of the different theological faiths" described in this manuscript probably connects to the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." Whitman also used the term "koboo" in that poem. Gary Schmidgall glosses the term "koboo" as referring to "a native of Sumatra," and Andrew Lawson has noted that Whitman apparently picked up the reference from a book by Walter M. Gibson, an American adventurer (Walt Whitman, Selected Poems, 1855–1892, ed. Gary Schmidgall [New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1999], 488; Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006], 91). The manuscript is pasted down, so an image of the reverse is not available.



Whitman Archive Title: Describing the death of nine
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00113
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: Describing the death
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript bears some similarity to lines from the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." The handwriting and ink of this manuscript are very similar to the handwriting and ink on the back (nyp.00511), which features draft lines of the same poem. The date of both is therefore likely before or early in 1855.



Whitman Archive Title: I can tell of the
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00511
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: I can tell of the long besieged city
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines in this manuscript are similar to lines used in the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." On the back is a prose draft (nyp.00113), also possibly related to "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: undulating
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00116
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: undulating swiftly merging from womb to birth
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Language in the manuscript is similar to lines that appeared in the fifth poem in that edition, later titled "I Sing the Body Electric." The discussion of the speed of the stars in this manuscript bears some resemblance to lines in the poem ultimately titled "Song of Myself." For further discussion of the relationship between this manuscript and the 1855 Leaves of Grass, see Kenneth M. Price, "The Lost Negress of 'Song of Myself' and the Jolly Young Wenches of Civil War Washington," in Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays, ed. Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 229–30. The manuscript has been pasted down, so an image of the reverse is not currently available.



Whitman Archive Title: Loveblows
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00122
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: Loveblows Loveblossoms
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Several words from this manuscript ("loveroot," "silkthread," "crotch," and "vine") were used in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that was later titled "Song of Myself." Other lines and words became part of the opening lines of "Broad-Axe Poem" and "Bunch Poem" in the 1856 edition (later titled "Song of the Broad-Axe" and "Spontaneous Me"). The date of the manuscript is therefore probably before or early in 1855. This manuscript is pasted down, so an image of the back of the leaf is currently unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: airscud
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00734
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: Loveaxles
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript between 1850 and 1855, as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. This list of words may have been brainstorming for lines that appeared in the first and fifth poems of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric." On the reverse (nyp.00100) is a fragment related to the poem eventually titled "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?"



Whitman Archive Title: I ask nobody's faith
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00102
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: I ask nobody's faith
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The paper and ink are similar to that used for other early poetry manuscripts, and the lines bear a distant resemblance to ideas used in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." In his transcription of this manuscript, Richard Maurice Bucke combines it with "Do I not prove myself" (uva.00251.html), but the manuscripts do not appear to be continuous (Notes and Fragments [London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899], 25).



Whitman Archive Title: Night of south winds
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00078
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: Ms. leaf recto (Night of south winds — Night of the large few stars ..)
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, approximately 19.5 x 19 cm., handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript between 1850 and 1855 as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Words and imagery from the manuscript appear in the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." On the reverse (nyp.00733) are lines used in a different part of the same poem.



Whitman Archive Title: The crowds naked in the
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00733
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: Ms. leaf verso (The crowds naked in the bath...)
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, approximately 19.5 x 19 cm., handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript between 1850 and 1855, as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The phrase "attraction of gravity," used in this manuscript, was used twice in that edition, including in a line in the poem eventually titled "A Song for Occupations." The last line of the manuscript, about the mouse staggering infidels, appeared in a slightly revised form in the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." On the reverse (nyp.00078) are lines also used in that poem.



Whitman Archive Title: vain the mastadon retreats beneath
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00079
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 18.5 by 19.7 cm. (irregular), handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript between 1850 and 1855 as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines from the manuscript appear in the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." On the reverse are two prose notes, nyp.00523 and nyp.00524.



Whitman Archive Title: ground where you may rest
Whitman Archive ID: rut.00025
Repository: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey: Special Collections and University Archives
Repository ID: Ac.605
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript fragment includes several lines of prose that became, after slight revision, lines of poetry in the initial poem of the 1855 Leaves of Grass (ultimately titled "Song of Myself"). The lines that appear in the poem begin with "Sit awhile wayfarer" and continue through the end of the manuscript, ending with "and open the gate for your egress hence." These lines remained, with minor revisions, through all the various versions of "Song of Myself." The manuscript is held at Rutgers University Library along with several similar manuscripts that are numbered sequentially and probably date from around or before 1855: see "American literature must become distinct" (rut.00010), "dithyrambic trochee" (rut.00022), and "The only way in which" (rut.00023).



Whitman Archive Title: Do you know what music
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00088
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 4
Repository Title: An Essay on the Soul
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was preparing material for his first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. A portion of the first paragraph of the manuscript, dealing with music and its relationship to the soul, is similar to a passage in the poem eventually titled "A Song For Occupations." Other language in the manuscript is similar to the prose preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and to lines from the poems that would eventually be titled "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric."



Whitman Archive Title: I know many beautiful things
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00031
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript between 1850 and 1855, as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Ideas and phrases from the manuscript appear in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." This manuscript also includes lines and phrases that appear in other manuscripts. See loc.00387 ("Lofty sirs") and loc.00163 ("Rule in all addresses").



Whitman Archive Title: You villain, Touch
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00002
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Song of Myself,
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript includes drafts of lines used in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The prose drafted on the back of this and several other related manuscript leaves includes ideas and phrases that resemble those used in "Unnamed Lands," a poem published first in the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Poem—a perfect school
Whitman Archive ID: tul.00011
Repository: University of Tulsa: Walt Whitman Ephemera
Box: 1
Folder: 2
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably written in about 1855. The proposed poem about "a perfect school" is not known to have been published, although words and sentiments that appear in this manuscript also appeared in the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." This manuscript's reference to "manly exercises" may also relate to a line in the poem eventually titled "A Song for Occupations."" On the back of this leaf (tul.00002) are draft lines that were used in the third poem in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "To Think of Time."



Whitman Archive Title: I am a Student
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00238
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 9.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines in the manuscript are similar to sentences used in the preface to that edition. Ideas expressed in the manuscript also relate loosely to lines in the first poem in the 1855 edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." Lines written on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00570 appeared in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: The spotted hawk salutes the
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00570
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 9.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines from the manuscript were included in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." Several lines of poetry are drafted on the back of this leaf (uva.00238.



Whitman Archive Title: I call back blunderers
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00250
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4.5 x 19.5 cm pasted to 7 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The last couple of lines are similar to lines in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: Do I not prove myself
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00251
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8 x 18.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. In language, ideas, and structure, the manuscript most closely resembles lines 39–43 in "Debris," a poem published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. However, the ideas and some of the language are also similar to other early manuscripts that relate to the first and second poems in the 1855 edition of Leaves, ultimately titled "Song of Myself" and "A Song for Occupations" (see "Priests" [loc.00013], "I know as well as" [duk.00051], and "[Fa]bles, traditions" [duk.00261]). In his transcription of this manuscript, Richard Maurice Bucke combines it with "I ask nobody's faith" (nyp.00102), but the manuscripts do not appear to be continuous (Notes and Fragments [London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899], 25). Poetic lines written on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00568) appeared in the poem eventually titled ""Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: Whatever I say of myself
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00568
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8 x 18.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines from the manuscript appear in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled ""Song of Myself." Poetic lines on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00251) also relate to poems in the 1855 Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: His very aches are exstasy
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00602
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 18.5 x 17.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The fragmentary lines may relate to a section on touch included in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." Poetic lines on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00256) relate to lines in the poem eventually titled "The Sleepers."



Whitman Archive Title: Topple down upon him
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00258
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15.5 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. It is a draft of lines that appear in the fourth poem of that edition, eventually titled "The Sleepers." A revised version of the phrase "pennies on their eyes" appears in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." Lines on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00566) relate to the poem eventually titled "Faces."



Whitman Archive Title: Where the little musk ox
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00261
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. A line from the manuscript appears in the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." Lines on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00262) also relate to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: Who knows that I shall
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00262
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Versions of the manuscript lines appear in the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." Lines on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00261) also relate to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: You there
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00263
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12.5 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. It is a draft of lines that appear in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." A series of notes about poetic meter are written on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00603).



Whitman Archive Title: And their voices
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00264
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4.5 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The notes were revised and incorporated into the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: The horizon's edge
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00265
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8.5 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript includes drafts of lines used in the first and tenth poems in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself" and "There Was a Child Went Forth," respectively.



Whitman Archive Title: I am become the poet
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00269
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4 x 14.5 cm pasted to 4.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The first line in this manuscript matches a line in the "Talbot Wilson" notebook (loc.00141, recto leaf 38) and is similar in structure to lines that appeared in the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The image of the poet navigating stairs also appears in what would become section 44 of "Song of Myself." Draft lines written on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00600) may also relate to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: I think I could dash
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00600
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4 x 14.5 cm pasted to 4.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The first line in this manuscript matches a line in the "Talbot Wilson" notebook (loc.00141, recto leaf 38) and is similar in structure to lines that appeared in the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The image of the poet navigating stairs also appears in what would become section 44 of "Song of Myself." Draft lines written on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00600) may also relate to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript may relate to a passage about touch that appeared in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." In his transcription of this manuscript, Richard Maurice Bucke included lines at the beginning and end that read: "Yet I strike and dart through . . . . . . " and "I am a creased and cut sea; the furious wind . . . . . ." (Notes and Fragments [London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899], 34–5). These lines do not currently appear on the manuscript. Draft lines written on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00269) relate to lines in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: Can ? make me
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00273
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines bear some similarity to lines in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." Poetic lines on the back of this leaf (uva.00562) relate to the poem eventually titled "Faces."



Whitman Archive Title: halt in the shade
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00561
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript fragments of poetry are partial drafts of lines used in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." Lines written on the back of this manuscript (uva.00278) are similar in idea to lines in the poem "To One Shortly To Die," first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: and nobody else am the
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00280
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4 x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines were used in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." More draft lines of poetry are written on the back of this leaf (uva.00560).



Whitman Archive Title: were paid for with steamships
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00483
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 140
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines from the manuscript appear in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." Additional poetic lines are drafted on the back of this manuscript leaf (yal.00452).



Whitman Archive Title: The test
Whitman Archive ID: med.00727
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: The lines in this manuscript likely contributed to lines of the poem that would eventually be titled "Song of Myself." The date of the manuscript is therefore probably before or early in 1855.



Whitman Archive Title: Breathjuice
Whitman Archive ID: med.00728
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: This list may have contributed indirectly to the ideas found in what became the second section of the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." Those lines deal with breath, scents, and sexuality, all of which are suggested by the terms in this manuscript. Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances or date of its composition, but it seems likely that it was written before or early in 1855.



Whitman Archive Title: The Katy-did works her
Whitman Archive ID: med.00901
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: The language in this manuscript is similar to the following line from the first poem in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself": "Where the katydid works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well;" (1855, p. 37). Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances of its composition, but it is likely that it was written in the early 1850s as Whitman was preparing materials for the first edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: What babble is this about
Whitman Archive ID: med.00902
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: The language in this manuscript is similar to the following line from first poem in first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself": "What blurt is it about virtue and about vice?" (1855, p. 28). Because this manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances of its composition, but it is possible that it was written in the early 1850s as Whitman was preparing materials for the first edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: I tell you greedy smoucher
Whitman Archive ID: med.00903
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: The language in this manuscript is similar to the following line from the poem that would eventually be titled "Song of Myself": "By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms" (1855, p. 29). Ideas and words from this manuscript are also similar to ideas and words that appeared in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. See, for instance, the line: "the melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to the toss and pallor of years of moneymaking with all their scorching days and icy nights and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or infinitessimals of parlors, or shameless stuffing while others starve . . " (1855, p. x). Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances of its composition, but it is possible that it was written in the early 1850s as Whitman was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. In his transcription of the manuscript, Richard Maurice Bucke paired it with another manuscript, "Remember that the clock and" (duk.00298).



Whitman Archive Title: I entertain all the aches
Whitman Archive ID: med.00909
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Phrasing and imagery in this manuscript are reminiscent of phrases and ideas Whitman used in the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, ultimately titled "Song of Myself." Compare these lines from that edition: "I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass" and "Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes out of its ribs" (1855, pp. 13, 36). Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances of its composition, but it is possible that it was written in the early 1850s as Whitman was preparing materials for the first edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Where the boys dive and
Whitman Archive ID: med.00910
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: The phrasing and imagery in this manuscript are reminiscent of the following line of the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, ultimately titled "Song of Myself": "Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon" (1855, p. 37). Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances of its composition, but it is possible that it was written in the early 1850s as Whitman was preparing materials for the first edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: The Elder Brother of the
Whitman Archive ID: med.00911
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: The phrasing and imagery in this manuscript are reminiscent of the following line of the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, ultimately titled "Song of Myself": "And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own" (1855, p. 16). Because this manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances of its composition, but it is possible that it was written in the early 1850s as Whitman was preparing materials for the first edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: (Of the great poet)
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00128
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 69
Date: About 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: This manuscript includes notes that anticipate the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Images and phrases in the second paragraph of the first leaf are reminscent of lines in both the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself" and the poem eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric." Another line on the first leaf appeared in a slightly different form in "Poem of The Singers, and of The Words of Poems" in the 1856 edition of Leaves (a poem later titled "Song of the Answerer"). The stated desire for "satisfiers" and "lovers" (found here on the bottom of the second leaf) appears in "Poem of Many in One," also first published in the 1856 edition and later titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore."



Whitman Archive Title: Rule in all addresses
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00163
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, Rule in All Addresses.
Date: Before 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Lines and phrases on both the recto and verso of this manuscript contributed to portions of the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself," and possibly to other sections of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, suggesting a composition date before 1855. However, this manuscript also includes lines that probably contributed to "Sun-Down Poem" (later retitled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry") in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. It is possible that some of these poetic lines contributed to the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. A line in this manuscript is similar to the following line, in the poem later titled "Song of Myself": "I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself" (1855, p. 17). Another line is similar to the lines "And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's-self is" (1855, p. 53) and "And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man" (1855, p. 26). Another manuscript line is similar to the line "Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man" (1855, p. 23). And several manuscript lines are similar to the lines beginning "Not merely of the New World but of Africa Europe or Asia . . . . a wandering savage, / A farmer, mechanic, or artist . . . . a gentleman, sailor, lover or quaker, / A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician or priest" (1855, p. 24). Three other lines are similar to: "Storming enjoying planning loving cautioning, / Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, / I tread day and night such roads" (1855, p. 38). Edward Grier speculates that Whitman's note "Don't forget the bombardment" relates to the "bombardment" of the "old artillerist" in "Song of Myself": "I am an old artillerist, and tell of some fort's bombardment . . . . and am there again" (1855, p. 40). (See Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:165). Several phrases of the prose on the verso were probably later used, in somewhat revised form, in the following lines from "Sun-down Poem" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass: "The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious, / My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Would not people laugh at me?" (1856, p. 216). The poem was later titled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." It is possible that some of the poetic lines on the verso contributed to the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines "I am too great to be a mere President or Major General / I remain with my fellows—with mechanics, and farmers and common people" may relate to the sentence from the preface that reads: "Other states indicate themselves in their deputies....but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors...but always most in the common people" (1855, p. iii). The line "I remain with them all on equal terms" may also be related to the following line in the preface: "The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms" (1855, p. vii). The line "In me are the old and young the fool and the wise thinker" may be related to a similar phrase in the poem eventually titled "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?": "The stupid and the wise thinker" (1855, p. 92). The phrase "mother of many children" appears in both the preface and in the poem later titled "Faces."



Whitman Archive Title: After all is said and
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00797
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 3
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The second paragraph of this prose manuscript contains lines which appeared in a slightly altered form in the first poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The poem was later divided into numbered sections and titled "Song of Myself"; the lines here appeared in section 4. The second paragraph also bears a distant resemblance to a line in the poem eventually titled "Faces" and to a line in the poem eventually titled "Song of the Answerer." The reverse side of this manuscript leaf (duk.00007) contains lines related to other sections of "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: I heat the hot cores
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00088
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: I heat the hot cores within
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript between 1850 and 1855, as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Words and imagery from the manuscript are similar to lines in the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The manuscript has been pasted down, so an image of the back of the leaf is unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: I shall venerate hours and
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00089
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: I shall venerate hours and days
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman likely drafted this manuscript between 1850 and 1855, as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Some of the language in the manuscript is similar to language in the first poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." On the back of this manuscript is another poetry draft (nyp.00742) .



Whitman Archive Title: Why should I subscribe money
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00742
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: Why should I subscribe money, to build some hero’s statue?
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman may have drafted this manuscript between 1850 and 1855, as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Language in the manuscript bears some similarity to language in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled Song of Myself. A poetry draft on the back of this manuscript (nyp.00089) may also relate to Song of Myself.



Whitman Archive Title: After death
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00133
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: Mid-1850s
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 7 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably written in the mid-1850s. The lines beginning "After death" are not known to have been published in Whitman's lifetime. The lines on the verso, beginning "I have all lives," are likely related to the poem first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass as "Poem of The Sayers of The Words of The Earth" and ultimately entitled "A Song of the Rolling Earth." Because the handwriting is similar on the two sides, we treat them here as a single text.



Whitman Archive Title: [How can there be immortality]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00014
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4.5 x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These lines, appearing on a very small section of white laid paper cut and cropped irregularly, bear a strong resemblance to the (eventual) second verse paragraph in section 6 of "Starting from Paumanok," first published in 1860 as "Proto-Leaf." The fragmentary lines on the verso (beginning "Downward, buoyant, swif[t]"), represent a different version of a line incorporated in the pre-1855 notebook poem "Pictures" and of one inscribed in the 1854 notebook [I know a rich capitalist...], currently housed at the New York Public Library.



Whitman Archive Title: Remember if you are dying
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00278
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1860. The lines are similar in subject to lines in the poem "To One Shortly To Die," first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. The use of ellipses within poetic lines was characteristic of Whitman's first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, however, and lines in this manuscript also resemble lines that appeared in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." On the upper right corner of the manuscript appear the words "note last page of 'Ghost-seers'" in Whitman's hand, which may be a reference to one of the two volumes of The Night Side of Nature, Or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers, by Catherine Crowe (London: T. C. Newby, 1848; G. Routledge & Co., 1852). Whitman mentioned the book in a conversation with Horace Traubel on December 9, 1889 (With Walt Whitman in Camden, 6:180–2). The phrase "Ghost-seers" also recalls a statement regarding Emerson in "Leaves-Droppings," a section of correspondence and commentary Whitman appended to the 1856 edition: "[Emerson] sees the future of truths as our Spirit-seers discern the future of man..." Fragmentary lines written on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00561) were used in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: you woman, mother of children
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00137
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 24.5 cm x 24.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript may have been written in the early 1850s, as Whitman was preparing material for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The language and imagery in the manuscript are similar to language and imagery used in the preface to that edition and in the first poem, eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: (Poem) Shadows
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00119
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: (Poem) ? Reflections Shadows
Date: Between 1850 and 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript may have been written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The description of the plate-glass windows on Broadway bears some resemblance to a description in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." This manuscript also bears a distant resemblance to a discussion of "shadows" in the poem later titled "There Was a Child Went Forth." It is also possible that the manuscript was written later, however: the description of Broadway in these lines also closely resembles a description Whitman wrote in his unfinished poem known as "The Two Vaults," a poem that is recorded in a New York notebook (loc.00348) that probably dates to the early 1860s. Whitman also wrote about Broadway elsewhere in later poems, so the manuscript may have been written still later. The manuscript has been pasted down, so an image of the back of the leaf is currently unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: The Whale-boat
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00117
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 23
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: late 1850s
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 cm x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains notes about whales that mirror a passage about whales published in "Song of Myself". A direct relationship between this manuscript and Whitman's published work is unknown, although a possible relationship also exists with drafts of the poem "The Sleepers" in which Whitman was working with the idea of a whale being harpooned. These notes may be a continuation of notes written on two separate scraps and held at Duke University (The Trent Collection of Walt Whitman Manuscripts, Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library), "The Whale," MS q 88.



Whitman Archive Title: What babble is this about
Whitman Archive ID: med.00904
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Between 1850 and 1867
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Language in this manuscript is similar to the following line from the first poem in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself": "Walking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the brush;" (1855, p. 36). Language in this manuscript is also similar to a line in the long manuscript draft poem, unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures." The line in "Pictures" reads: "And there, rude grave‑mounds in California—and there a path worn in the grass." The first several lines of "Pictures" (not including this line) were revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880. The poem was later published in Leaves of Grass as part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster (1881, p. 310). This manuscript may relate to the poem "A Farm Picture," published in Leaves of Grass in 1867, particularly the line: "A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding" (1867, p. 46). This manuscript may relate to the poem titled "A Song of Joys," which first appeared in the 1860 Leaves of Grass as "Poem of Joys." A similar line in that poem reads: "O the joy of my spirit! It is uncaged! It darts like lightning!" (1860, p. 259). Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances of its composition. Although Bucke has grouped the lines together in his transcription, there is also a possibility that they represent three separate manuscripts.



Whitman Archive Title: [med Cophósis]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00005
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, Before 1855, Women
Date: Between 1852 and 1854
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These pages were written by Whitman in the early to mid-1850s. William White described the pages as "torn from a tall notebook" (Daybooks and Notebooks [New York: New York University Press, 1978], 773–777). White noted a relationship between these pages and the poems "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Song of the Answerer," and "There Was a Child Went Forth." Some of the ideas and language being worked out here also appear in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." For a discussion of the dating and importance of this notebook, see Matt Miller, Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 11–16.



Whitman Archive Title: "Summer Duck"
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00158
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, Before 1855, Wood Drake
Date: Between 1852 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These pages were written by Whitman in the early to mid-1850s. William White described the pages as "torn from a tall notebook" (Daybooks and Notebooks [New York: New York University Press, 1978], 770–773). White noted a possible relationship between the opening words and the first poem of the 1855 edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The lines at the end of this manuscript were also reworked and used for a different section of the same poem. For further discussion of the dating and importance of this notebook, see Matt Miller, Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 26–29.



Whitman Archive Title: From the tips of his
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05705
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Notes & Nbks Brooklyniana Fulton St
Date: Between 1853 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably written between 1853 and 1855, while Whitman was working on the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Versions of these cancelled and fragmentary lines were used in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: The regular old followers
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00024
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: 9th av.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00354
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Undated Thoughts, Ideas, and Trial lines (3 V.)
Date: between 1854 and 1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 45 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
Content: An early notebook Whitman used for various purposes. William White, in his edition of Whitman's Daybooks and Notebooks (New York: New York University Press, 1978. 3 vols.), noted a relationship between rough drafts of poems in this notebook (called "An Early Notebook" in White's edition) and the 1860 poem eventually titled "Starting from Paumanok." On surface 54 is a passage that seems to have contributed to the 1860 poem that became "Song at Sunset." On surface 85 is a passage that perhaps contributed to the 1855 poem later titled "Song of Myself," and a passage on surface 62 might have been used in the 1856 poem eventually titled "Miracles." Because Whitman wrote entries from both ends of the notebook, the writing on about half of the leaves is upside-down in relation to other leaves. Some leaves have become disbound, and their original positions are uncertain. Our ordering is based on the earliest known transcription, done by Fredson Bowers in 1955.



Whitman Archive Title: Autobiographical Data
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05935
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: I know a rich capitalist
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00129
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
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
Content: Emory Holloway has pointed out that Whitman's reference to the sinking of the San Francisco indicates that this notebook, "or at least part of it, is later than 1853." He writes that "it was probably begun in 1854" because the "marble church" in the first passage presumably refers to the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, "which was not completed until then." See Holloway, "A Whitman Manuscript," American Mercury 3 (December 1924), 475–480. See also Andrew C. Higgins, "Art and Argument: The Rise of Walt Whitman's Rhetorical Poetics, 1838-1855," PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1999; and Edward F. Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:128–135. Of the notebook passages that can be identified with published works, most represent early versions of images and phrases from the 1855 poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." One passage clearly contributed to the 1856 poem later titled "Song of the Open Road." Others are possibly connected to the poems eventually titled "A Song for Occupations" and "Great Are the Myths," both first published in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and to the preface for that volume. One passage seems to have contributed to the 1860–1861 poem that Whitman later titled "Our Old Feuillage." One passage is similar to a line in a long manuscript poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures". The first several lines of that poem (not including the line in question) were revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880 and then in Leaves of Grass as part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster (1881–1882, p. 310). No image of the outside back cover of the notebook is available because it has been stitched into a larger volume.



Whitman Archive Title: Understand that you can have
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00138
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Repository Title: ["Understand that you can have in your writing..."]
Date: 1855 or 1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Although no specific lines from this manuscript can be directly tied to any of Whitman's published work, the language and ideas are similar to certain sections of the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, as well as to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself," suggesting that this manuscript may have been written around that time. Wording in this manuscript is also similar to a line in the 1855 poem eventually titled "To Think of Time." A note written by Richard Maurice Bucke, one of Whitman's literary executors, dates the manuscript to 1855 or 1856 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:222).



Whitman Archive Title: In the course of the
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00942
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 1
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Several of the lines of poetry in this manuscript are drafts of lines used in the opening poem of that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." The lines match the section of the poem that runs from "And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves" through "I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe . . . . and am not contained between my hat and boots" (1855, pp. 16-17). The reverse sides of the leaves, together with several other leaves, constitute a draft essay that perhaps contributed to the 1860–1861 poem Unnamed Lands (see duk.00003).



Whitman Archive Title: Brutish human beings
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00085
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 12
Repository Title: Brutish human beings - wild men - the 'koboo'
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains notes by Whitman about what he calls "a very low kind of human beings," "wild men," the "koboo," apparently described to Whitman by Elias Pierson in June 1857. Pierson had been to China in the rebel army of Canton, and had seen the aboriginal "koboo" people, as reported in the manuscript, in the Ladrone islands, in the South China Sea off Canton. To reinforce the truthfulness of Pierson's stories about the "koboo," Whitman mentions the fact that Captain Walter Murray Gibson, who had also talked about the "koboo" people (possibly in the book Report, American Geographical and Statistical Society. Monthly Meeting. March, 1854. Captain Walter M. Gibson on the East Indian Archipelago: a Description of Its Wild Races of Men, published in 1854, and/or in The Prison of Weltevredin, and a Glance at the East Indian Archipelago, published in 1855), had affirmed that all his statements in the book were true and made in good faith. Since the term "koboo" is used by Whitman in "Song of Myself" (the term already appeared in the first published version of the poem, in the 1855 edition, and was retained in all the subsequent editions) and in "Salut au Monde!" (the term appeared in the first published version of the poem in the 1856 edition and was retained in all the subsequent editions), it is probable that Whitman first learned about the "koboo" by reading Gibson, and then heard again about them from Pierson. The manuscript also contains a clipping of a short newspaper column entitled "The Wild Men of Borneo," and a short comment on it.



Whitman Archive Title: Life light and
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04601
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Song of Prudence

Whitman Archive Title: Not to Dazzle
Whitman Archive ID: med.00729
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown,
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Lines from this manuscript were used in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The sentence that begins "The soul has that measureless pride..." also later became part of the poem "Song of Prudence." Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances of its composition, but it was probably written before or early in 1855.



Whitman Archive Title: Talbot Wilson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00141
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [after all]
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00001
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 50
Date: between about 1855 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is written on a green sheet used for the endpapers of the first edition of the Leaves of Grass (1855), an edition that begins with a ten-page statement in prose, originally untitled and later known generally as the 1855 Preface. This manuscript seems to represent an early attempt by Whitman to recast the 1855 prose Preface into poetry. The 1860–61 edition of Leaves of Grass introduced two new poems created in this way: "Poem of Many in One" (later "By Blue Ontario's Shore") and "Poem of the Last Explanation of Prudence" (later "Song of Prudence"). Neither of the published poems incorporates lines from this manuscript, though it and "Song of Prudence" are drawn from adjacent portions of the 1855 Preface.


Song of the Answerer

Whitman Archive Title: you know how
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00142
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.



Whitman Archive Title: Talbot Wilson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00141
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: See'st thou
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00162
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: Literary, Undated, The Voice of Walt Whitman.
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. It probably relates to the seventh poem in that edition, originally untitled, part of which eventually became "Song of the Answerer." The manuscript is collected in a bound volume with other manuscripts.



Whitman Archive Title: (Of the great poet)
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00128
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 69
Date: About 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: This manuscript includes notes that anticipate the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Images and phrases in the second paragraph of the first leaf are reminscent of lines in both the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself" and the poem eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric." Another line on the first leaf appeared in a slightly different form in "Poem of The Singers, and of The Words of Poems" in the 1856 edition of Leaves (a poem later titled "Song of the Answerer"). The stated desire for "satisfiers" and "lovers" (found here on the bottom of the second leaf) appears in "Poem of Many in One," also first published in the 1856 edition and later titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore."



Whitman Archive Title: After all is said and
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00797
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 3
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The second paragraph of this prose manuscript contains lines which appeared in a slightly altered form in the first poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The poem was later divided into numbered sections and titled "Song of Myself"; the lines here appeared in section 4. The second paragraph also bears a distant resemblance to a line in the poem eventually titled "Faces" and to a line in the poem eventually titled "Song of the Answerer." The reverse side of this manuscript leaf (duk.00007) contains lines related to other sections of "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: [med Cophósis]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00005
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, Before 1855, Women
Date: Between 1852 and 1854
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These pages were written by Whitman in the early to mid-1850s. William White described the pages as "torn from a tall notebook" (Daybooks and Notebooks [New York: New York University Press, 1978], 773–777). White noted a relationship between these pages and the poems "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Song of the Answerer," and "There Was a Child Went Forth." Some of the ideas and language being worked out here also appear in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." For a discussion of the dating and importance of this notebook, see Matt Miller, Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 11–16.



Whitman Archive Title: The regular old followers
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00024
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [most poets finish single specimens of]
Whitman Archive ID: bpl.00004
Repository: Boston Public Library: The Walt Whitman Collection
Repository Title: Notes on his poetry and Heine
Repository ID: Whitman Mss.3
Date: 1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A group of several notes, all concerned with the general topics of the character and social position of the poet. The sentences pencilled at the top of the page contributed to the poem "Myself and Mine," first published in 1860 as "No. 10" in the "Leaves of Grass" cluster. The list of seven attributes that is written in the middle of the page formed the basis for a stanza of "Poem of The Singers, and of The Words of Poems," published in 1856 and later combined with one of the 1855 poems to become "Song of the Answerer." Pasted to the manuscript is a clipping, annotated and dated June 1856, about Hungarian literary nationalism, and at the bottom of the page are notes on the German poet Heinrich Heine.



Whitman Archive Title: Produce great persons and the producers
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00166
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 51
Date: 1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten, print
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Content: Manuscript and clipping. On one side of the manuscript leaf (see the first image linked above) are several prose notes, including two versions of a paragraph that was later revised to become a line in "Poem of Many In One," published in Leaves of Grass (1856), and eventually titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore." The phrase "savage and luxuriant," which appears toward the bottom of this side, was used in Whitman's open letter to Emerson, published in an appendix to the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. On the other side of the leaf is a partial draft of "Poem of The Singers, and of the Words of Poems," also first published in 1856. In the final edition of Leaves of Grass this and another poem, which had been included in every edition since 1855, were combined to form "Song of the Answerer." Whitman pasted at least two newspaper clippings on the manuscript, one on each side. However, markings on both sides of the leaf indicate that Whitman potentially pasted a third, unidentified, newspaper clipping on this manuscript. One of these, which had covered Whitman's paragraphs but has since been detached, is included in the file; another is still pasted to the manuscript.



Whitman Archive Title: [Time always without break]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00118
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 7
Repository ID: #3839-j
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains two lines from Whitman's poem "Song of the Answerer." This fair copy was evidently made for an admirer: it includes Whitman's autograph in large letters above the lines "Camden New Jersey / March 14 1887—." The lines from the poem are quoted without revision from the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass, followed by the citation "(L of Grass—p 137)," which refers to the 1881 system of pagination. These lines come from the first verse paragraph of section 2 of the poem. This section began as the independent composition "19—Poem of The Singers, and of The Words of Poems" in 1856, after which it underwent various changes in content, title, and position until being joined with "Now List to My Morning Romanza" in 1881.


Song of the Banner at Daybreak

Whitman Archive Title: Pictures
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00042
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 4
Repository Title: Pictures
Date: between 1850 and 1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Poetry manuscript titled "Pictures," approximately six lines, heavily revised. The first few lines of this manuscript appeared, further revised, in "The Runner," first published in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. The middle section of the manuscript is possibly related to "Song of the Banner at Daybreak," which was first published in 1865 in Drum-Taps. A different version of last the two lines of the manuscript appear in another poetry draft, also titled "Pictures," now in Yale University's Beinecke Library. The writing on the verso is not Whitman's.



Whitman Archive Title: [O a new song]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00103
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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 I think I could not be the]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00040
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 3
Repository Title: O I think I could not be the solid land…
Date: between 1861 and 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Approximately four draft lines, showing a moderate amount of revision, for the poem "Song of the Banner at Daybreak," first published in 1865 in Drum-Taps and reprinted, with revisions, in subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass.


Song of the Broad-Axe

Whitman Archive Title: Song of the Broad-Axe
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00141
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 89
Date:
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 23 leaves, 20 cm x 12 cm, corrected proofs
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: Revision of poem cluster "Song of the Broad-Axe" contained in red slipcase measuring 24 cm x 15 cm. Revisions are made in ink and blue pencil on printed edition of the poem. WW apparently used two volumes to tear the leaves from, as every other page is slightly smaller than the rest, revisions are made only on the recto side of each leaf, and verso is crossed out.



Whitman Archive Title: wainscot, hut
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07428
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 20
Folder: L of G (1855). Manuscript Page.
Date: Before or early in 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript features a list of terms, many of which are found in "Broad-Axe Poem," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass and later titled "Song of the Broad-Axe." It is likely, therefore, that the list was written before or early in 1856. The reverse side (loc.00507) contains a draft of lines related to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: Loveblows
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00122
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: Loveblows Loveblossoms
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Several words from this manuscript ("loveroot," "silkthread," "crotch," and "vine") were used in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that was later titled "Song of Myself." Other lines and words became part of the opening lines of "Broad-Axe Poem" and "Bunch Poem" in the 1856 edition (later titled "Song of the Broad-Axe" and "Spontaneous Me"). The date of the manuscript is therefore probably before or early in 1855. This manuscript is pasted down, so an image of the back of the leaf is currently unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Bloom
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00294
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 32
Date: 1856 or before
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Leaf made from two scraps glued together. The bottom scrap contains notes toward "Song of the Broad-Axe," which was first published in Leaves of Grass 1856 as "Broad-Axe Poem." The writing on the top scrap, which describes one of Whitman's acquaintances, might have informed the description of the "headsman" in that poem.



Whitman Archive Title: Broadaxe
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00033
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: II-5 12
Date: about 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes written in three separate columns about the uses and history of the broadaxe. "The Broad-Axe Poem" first appeared in Leaves of Grass (1856), taking the title "Song of the Broad-Axe" in 1867.



Whitman Archive Title: [(illeg.) Dick Hunt]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00028
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: 1857 Trial Lines and Descriptions
Date: 1856-1857
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 90 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
Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 246–280, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "To a Common Prostitute," "You Felons on Trial in Courts," "Starting from Paumanok," "Trickle Drops," "I Was Looking for a Long While," "Poem of Joys," "Facing West from California's Shores," "To the States," "A Song of the Rolling Earth," "On the Beach a Night Alone," "Full of Life Now," and "With Antecedents."



Whitman Archive Title: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [George Walker]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00143
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 37
Folder: 1855-1856, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry trial lines
Date: between 1855-1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 45 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
Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:226–243, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Starting from Paumanok," "A Song for Occupations," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Salut au Monde!," "To One Shortly to Die," and "A Woman Waits for Me."


Song of the Exposition

Whitman Archive Title: After all, not to create only
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00069
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Folder: bv1
Date: about 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 29 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: Draft of the poem "After all, Not to Create Only," written for the opening of the fortieth Annual Exhibition of the American Institute in 1871 and published on 7 September 1871 in both the New York Commercial Advertiser and the New York Evening Post. It was reprinted in several newspapers and as a pamphlet, After All, Not to Create Only (1871); as "Song of the Exposition" in Two Rivulets (1876); and with some revisions in Leaves of Grass (1881–82). Sheets from the pamphlet were included in some copies of the 1871 Leaves of Grass. A note at the top of the manuscript, written by Whitman's friend William Sloane Kennedy, indicates that it was used as printer's copy for the pamphlet publication.



Whitman Archive Title: [The trilogy]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00381
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 25
Folder: After All, Not to Create Only (1871). Manuscript Drafts and Notes.
Date: about 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: about 50 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
Content: Several notes and drafts with an unknown relationship to one another, but all, at least thematically, resembling the poem first published as "After All, Not to Create Only" in 1871 (later published as "Song of the Exposition"). The pages include trial lines for the poem, as well as notes which indicate the general ambitions and themes of the work. Within these pages, other trial titles of the poem are also included: "After all, not to command only," "After all, not to create but to obey," and "After all, not to create or destroy only." On the verso of one of the leaves is a letter from William Black seeking Whitman's autograph.



Whitman Archive Title: After all, not to create only
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00382
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 25
Folder: After All, Not to Create Only (1871). Manuscript Drafts and Notes.
Date: about 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 30 leaves, largest 25 x 20 cm, 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
Content: Bound manuscript of "After all, not to create only." Although the manuscript contains many revisions, it appears to be relatively near the final draft. Whitman wrote this poem following a request by the Committee on Invitations of the American Institute to deliver an original poem at the opening of the Fortieth Annual Exhibition. "After All, Not to Create Only" was first published in 1871. It was later revised and the title changed to "Song of the Exposition."



Whitman Archive Title: Come, Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00383
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 25
Folder: After All, Not to Create Only (1871). Manuscript Drafts and Notes.
Date: about 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 10 leaves, largest 25 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19
Content: A relatively clean draft titled "Come, Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia." This material was later incorporated into "After All, Not to Create Only," first published in 1871. That poem was later revised and title changed to "Song of the Exposition."



Whitman Archive Title: After All, Not to Create Only
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05680
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 25
Folder: After All, Not to Create Only (1871). Proof Sheets
Date: about 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: both 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 | 23 | 24
Content: Proof sheets printed by Pearson, Washington. Whitman made only one correction (see surface 11). "After All, Not to Create Only" was first published in 1871. It was later revised and the title was changed to "Song of the Exposition."



Whitman Archive Title: Struggling steadily to the front
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00129
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 50
Date: about 1875
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Heavily revised draft of the prefatory note for "Song of the Exposition," as it appeared in the 1876 volume Two Rivulets. Earlier and later publications of the poem did not include this prose introduction.



Whitman Archive Title: The Dalliance of the Eagles
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00184
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Dalliance of the Eagles (1880). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1880
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25.8 x 18.6 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in ink on a proof of "The Dalliance of the Eagles," "Ah, little knows the Laborer," "Hast never come to thee an hour?," and "My Picture-Gallery," are 14 words of notations in Whitman's hand. The proof has been pasted to a heavy piece of paper, on the verso of which is "A Riddle Song," part of "Italian Music in Dakota," and a clipped headline reading "The Society Articles Save Labor. Lighten the Labor for Mother."



Whitman Archive Title: Come, Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00380
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 25
Folder: After All, Not to Create Only (1871). Manuscript Drafts and Notes.
Date: about 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Four pages of lines later revised and included in "After All, Not to Create Only," first published 1871. That poem was later revised and the title changed to "Song of the Exposition."


Song of the Open Road

Whitman Archive Title: No doubt the efflux of the soul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00025
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Undated Thoughts, Ideas, and Trial lines (3 V.)
Date: Before 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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Content: This notebook consists almost entirely of prose. However, the ideas and language developed throughout the notebook can be linked to a number of poems that appeared in Leaves of Grass, including "Song of Myself," "Great are the Myths" (ultimately shortened to a few lines and titled "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night"), "Faces," "The Sleepers," and "To Think of Time," versions of which appeared in Leaves of Grass in 1855. One manuscript passage is similar to a passage in the preface to the 1855 edition. Thus, this notebook was almost certainly written before that date. Content from the first several paragraphs of this notebook was also used slightly revised in "Song of the Open Road," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves as "Poem of the Road."



Whitman Archive Title: is wider than the west
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00510
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This draft fragment includes phrases and poetic lines that were revised and used in different editions of Leaves of Grass. "The orbed opening of whose mouth," struck through on this manuscript, is suggestive of a line that appeared in 1855 in the poem ultimately called "Song of Myself": "The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full." The line "Nature is rude at first—but once begun never tires" was used slightly altered in "Song of the Open Road," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass under the title "Poem of the Road." Edward Grier, drawing from Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments (1899), adds a bracketed conclusion to the last line: "Most works of art [tire. Only the Great Chef d'OEuvres never tire and never dazzle at first.]" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:168). The line does not currently appear on the manuscript. On the reverse of this manuscript is a prose fragment on the subject of knowledge and learning (nyp.00024).



Whitman Archive Title: Talbot Wilson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00141
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 8
Folder: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, Notebooks, [1847], (80)
Date: Between 1847 and 1854
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 66 leaves, handwritten
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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: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 7
Folder: Photocopies Notebooks [before 1855]
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 31 leaves, handwritten
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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: I know a rich capitalist
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00129
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Emory Holloway has pointed out that Whitman's reference to the sinking of the San Francisco indicates that this notebook, "or at least part of it, is later than 1853." He writes that "it was probably begun in 1854" because the "marble church" in the first passage presumably refers to the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, "which was not completed until then." See Holloway, "A Whitman Manuscript," American Mercury 3 (December 1924), 475–480. See also Andrew C. Higgins, "Art and Argument: The Rise of Walt Whitman's Rhetorical Poetics, 1838-1855," PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1999; and Edward F. Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:128–135. Of the notebook passages that can be identified with published works, most represent early versions of images and phrases from the 1855 poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." One passage clearly contributed to the 1856 poem later titled "Song of the Open Road." Others are possibly connected to the poems eventually titled "A Song for Occupations" and "Great Are the Myths," both first published in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and to the preface for that volume. One passage seems to have contributed to the 1860–1861 poem that Whitman later titled "Our Old Feuillage." One passage is similar to a line in a long manuscript poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures". The first several lines of that poem (not including the line in question) were revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880 and then in Leaves of Grass as part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster (1881–1882, p. 310). No image of the outside back cover of the notebook is available because it has been stitched into a larger volume.



Whitman Archive Title: I subject all the teachings
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00249
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1854 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15.5 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman used language similar to what appears in these manuscript lines in the fifth poem in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric," as well as in the 1856 "Poem of the Road," eventually titled "Song of the Open Road." The manuscript is written on the blank side of an 1850s tax form from the City of Williamsburgh. 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" [loc.05354]), but as Edward Grier points out, this 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. The manuscript is thus difficult to date conclusively, but it was almost certainly written after 1854 and probably before 1860.



Whitman Archive Title: Rel ? outset
Whitman Archive ID: med.00776
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: between 1855 and 1868
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: A transcription of this manuscript appeared in Clifton Joseph Furness's Walt Whitman's Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts (Harvard University Press, 1928), 40. Its current location is unknown. The manuscript begins, "First I wish you to realize well that our boasted knowledege, precious and manifold as it is, sinks into niches and corners, before the infinite knowledge of the unknown," a statement reminiscent of the following line from "Poem of the Road" (1856): "All religion, all solid things, arts, governments—all that was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners before the processions of souls along the grand roads of the universe." This poem was eventually retitled "Song of the Open Road." The last part of the manuscript describes, as a metaphor for human attempts to articulate "the spiritual world," a worm "on a twig reaching out in the immense vacancy time and again, trying point after point." This image is one Whitman developed in the poem "A Noiseless Patient Spider," first published in the October 1868 issue of The Broadway, A London Magazine as the third of four numbered poems grouped under the title "Whispers of Heavenly Death."



Whitman Archive Title: [O I must not forget]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00286
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman's use of the tax form and the strong similarity this fragment bears both to the 1856 "Poem of the Road" (later "Song of the Open Road") and to the 1860 "Proto-Leaf" (eventually "Starting from Paumanok") indicate that this may have been a revision of the former poem or, as seems more likely, an early draft of "Proto-Leaf" intended for the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Song of the Open Road
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00847
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Song of the Open Road (1856). A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 12 leaves, handwritten
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Content: These corrected pages of "Song of the Open Road" contributed to the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass.


Song of the Redwood-Tree

Whitman Archive Title: [Farewell my brethren]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00373
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 1
Folder: war and hospital notes and memoranda
Date: about 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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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: poem (subject)
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00047
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 18
Date: about 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Notes for a poem about calls used in various occupations and, on the reverse of the second leaf, an early draft of a portion of "Song of the Redwood-Tree," a poem first published in the February 1874 issue of Harper's Magazine and reprinted in the "Centennial Songs" section of Two Rivulets (1876). Verso images are not available for the first and third leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: Song of the Redwood-Tree
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00297
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Song of the Redwood-Tree (1874). Proof Sheet.
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 40.5 x 25.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: A proof sheet of "Song of the Redwood-Tree," first published in 1874, with minor corrections and a note on the verso in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: Song of the Redwood Tree
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00064
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 90
Repository ID: #3829
Date: about 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 20 leaves, 11 x 12.5 cm to 22.5 x 17.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript contains a rough draft of the poem "Song of the Redwood-Tree" written, according to a note intialed by Whitman, during October and November 1873 prior to its first publication in the February 1874 issue of Harper's Magazine. In 1876 the poem was published in the group "Centennial Songs" and annexed to Two Rivulets. The poem appears ungrouped again in Leaves of Grass (1881). Several leaves contain deleted and undeleted titles or variant verse references to other published poems: "Eidólons", "Waves in the Vessel's Wake", "(a sonnet)" written "for Century Verses," which appears from a Library of Congress manuscript to have been a working title of the group that became "Centennial Verses" and "A California song".



Whitman Archive Title: Song of the Redwood Tree
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00067
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 91
Repository ID: #3829
Date: about 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 11 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Written on miscellaneous sheets of paper, including scraps of prose notes and letters, this manuscript contains eleven numbered leaves. Some pieces which were pasted together have been lifted and photographed separately to show lines obscured by the pasted-on scraps. This manuscript contains a rough draft of the poem "Song of the Redwood-Tree" written, according to a note intialed by Whitman, during October and November 1873 prior to its first publication in the February 1874 issue of Harper's Magazine. In 1876 the poem was published in the group "Centennial Songs" and annexed to Two Rivulets. The poem appears ungrouped again in Leaves of Grass (1881). The similarities between this manuscript draft and the Harper's edition of the poem seem to indicate that Whitman revised these pages in preparation for the first publication.


Song of the Rolling Earth, A

Whitman Archive Title: Poem incarnating the mind
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00346
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks, Before 1855
Date: Before 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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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: This is the Earths word
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00019
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 193
Date: About 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A note possibly related to the poem "A Song of the Rolling Earth," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass as "Poem of The Sayers of The Words of The Earth." A portrait of Whitman accompanies this manuscript in the Trent Collection, however, an image of this portrait is not included in this finding aid.



Whitman Archive Title: After death
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00133
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: Mid-1850s
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 7 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably written in the mid-1850s. The lines beginning "After death" are not known to have been published in Whitman's lifetime. The lines on the verso, beginning "I have all lives," are likely related to the poem first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass as "Poem of The Sayers of The Words of The Earth" and ultimately entitled "A Song of the Rolling Earth." Because the handwriting is similar on the two sides, we treat them here as a single text.



Whitman Archive Title: [(illeg.) Dick Hunt]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00028
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: 1857 Trial Lines and Descriptions
Date: 1856-1857
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 90 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 246–280, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "To a Common Prostitute," "You Felons on Trial in Courts," "Starting from Paumanok," "Trickle Drops," "I Was Looking for a Long While," "Poem of Joys," "Facing West from California's Shores," "To the States," "A Song of the Rolling Earth," "On the Beach a Night Alone," "Full of Life Now," and "With Antecedents."



Whitman Archive Title: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 7
Folder: Photocopies Notebooks [before 1855]
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 31 leaves, handwritten
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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.


Song of the Universal

Whitman Archive Title: Song of the Universal
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00069
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These four leaves make up an early complete draft of "Song of the Universal," first published simultaneously in the New York Evening Post and the New York Daily Graphic on June 17, 1874. The four leaves are bound together with other manuscripts.



Whitman Archive Title: [Come, said the Muse]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00062
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Very early draft fragment of "Song of the Universal," first published simultaneously in the New York Evening Post and the New York Daily Graphic on June 17, 1874. The manuscript bears the cancelled date "March 31, '74." The two leaves are bound together with other manuscripts.



Whitman Archive Title: Song of the Universal
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00064
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Very early draft fragment of "Song of the Universal," first published simultaneously in the New York Evening Post and the New York Daily Graphic on June 17, 1874. The leaf is bound together with other manuscripts.



Whitman Archive Title: [all the vast mass]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00065
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Very early draft fragment of "Song of the Universal," first published simultaneously in the New York Evening Post and the New York Daily Graphic on June 17, 1874. The leaf is bound together with other manuscripts.



Whitman Archive Title: [Christ]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00066
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Very early draft fragment of "Song of the Universal," first published simultaneously in the New York Evening Post and the New York Daily Graphic on June 17, 1874. The leaf is bound together with other manuscripts.



Whitman Archive Title: Song of the Universal
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00076
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 13 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
Content: Draft of the poem "The Song of the Universal", which first appeared simultaneously in The New York Evening Post and The New York Daily Graphic on 17 June 1874. It was later reprinted in the New York World on 19 June 1874, in the Camden New Republic on 20 June 1874, and in Two Rivulets (1876).



Whitman Archive Title: Song of the Universal
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00061
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript is a note in Whitman's hand about the poem "Song of the Universal," with the date June 17, 1874. The leaf is bound together with other manuscripts.



Whitman Archive Title: Song of the Universal
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00068
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: June 1874
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Content: These five leaves make up what is apparently a complete printer's copy of "Song of the Universal," first published simultaneously in the New York Evening Post and the New York Daily Graphic on June 17, 1874. The manuscript is dated June 1874. The leaves are bound together with other manuscripts.


Song the

Whitman Archive Title: Song
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00257
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 30
Date: 1850–1892
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript scrap with ideas for a poem or poems about democracy, the future, women, young men, and the joy of life. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "The carpenter's and."


Songs of Parting

Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 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
Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."



Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Departure
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00069
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 92
Repository ID: #3829
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript appears to have been a trial cover leaf for the cluster "Songs of Parting," new to the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman struck out the words "A few" above the current title, but left undeleted four other possibilities at the top of the leaf: "Songs of Departure/ Departing,/ Termination/ Completion."


Soon Shall the Winter's Foil Be Here

Whitman Archive Title: Soon shall the winter's foil be here
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00016
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository ID: HM 1192
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily corrected draft of "Soon Shall the Winter's Foil Be Here," a poem published first in the New York Herald on February 21, 1888. It was reprinted in November Boughs (1888) and Leaves of Grass (1891–92), where it appeared in the "Sands at Seventy" cluster.


Soul Duet, A

Whitman Archive Title: A Soul Duet
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00014
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 4
Date: probably before 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily revised draft of a poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime. The regular, rhymed structure and pious theme suggest a date before the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855.


Sounds of the Winter

Whitman Archive Title: Old Age Echoes
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00228
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Echoes (1891). Proof Sheet.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28.5 x 16.5 cm, 6 x 14 cm attached, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof sheet of "Old Age Echoes" with many corrections written in ink and pencil. "Old Age Echoes" is a general heading for four poems: "Sounds of the Winter," "The Unexpress'd," "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!," and "After the Argument."



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age Echoes
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00081
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: 1889-1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20.1 by 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Lightly revised draft of a poem titled "Sounds of the winter too." Under the title "Sounds of the Winter," the poem was one of four belonging to the "Old Age Echoes" cluster, first published in Lippincott's Magazine 47 (March 1891) and then reprinted in Good-bye My Fancy (1891). The writing on the verso (not in Whitman's hand) makes reference to Good-Bye My Fancy and to "Sounds of Winter," as well as to a "Putnam 1902 Edition." There is also a postmark dated 18 October 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age Echoes
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00152
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 65
Date: 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 52.5 cm x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The general title, "Old Age Echoes," appears at the top of the page. Beneath that title are two poems with individual titles: "Sounds of the Winter" and "The Unexpress'd." Pasted to the leaf below the second poem is a woodcut engraving of Whitman along with his autograph. The untitled lines directly following the picture and autograph eventually become the poem titled "After the Argument." The three poems were first published together in Lippincott's Magazine, March 1891, under the general title "Old Age Echoes."


Spain, 1873-74

Whitman Archive Title: Spain
Whitman Archive ID: har.00002
Repository: Harvard University: Manuscripts Department, Houghton Library
Repository ID: bMS Am 1545 (1)
Date: March 16, 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is an unsigned draft of the poem "Spain," which was first published in 1873. The poem was later titled "Spain, 1873-74."


Spanish Peaks—Evening on the Plains, The

Whitman Archive Title: [Two men, apparently father & son]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00313
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: Two men, apparently father and son on foot…
Date: between 1879 and 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Brief note that records an image from Whitman's 1879 trip through Missouri and Kansas and into Colorado. Whitman used this image in "The Spanish Peaks—Evening on the Plains," which was first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Sparkles From the Wheel

Whitman Archive Title: [see the profuse sparks like gold]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00299
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Sparkles From the Wheel (1871). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4 x 17 cm, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A draft of lines that would be revised and published as "Sparkles From the Wheel" in 1871.



Whitman Archive Title: Sparkles from the Wheel
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00234
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 25.5 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: First published not in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, but in the separate publication Passage to India in 1871. Whitman penciled in the note "Long Primer / middling wide measure" in the upper left corner of the first leaf, and on the verso of the second wrote and deleted (also in pencil) the note "The worship of God is, honoring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, & loving the greatest men best. Those who envy or calumniate great men, hate God William Blake[.]" After being bound with the rest of the Passage to India poems as a supplement to Leaves of Grass, in 1881 the poem was permanently transferred to the cluster Autumn Rivulets within the main body of Leaves of Grass.


Speaking of literary style in

Whitman Archive Title: Speaking of literary style
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00532
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Around 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A prose fragment with notes about poetry, in which Whitman quotes Voltaire. The prose has no known connection to Whitman's published work. On the reverse are poetic lines, some of which appeared slightly revised in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."


Specimen Days

Whitman Archive Title: For Dem Vistas
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00458
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: 1882 or before
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A brief paragraph suggesting that the unifying motif of a projected volume of miscellaneous prose pieces should be various aspects of nature viewed from the perspective of democracy. Although Whitman eventually titled his collection Specimen Days (1882–83), the present manuscript uses the working title "Mulleins & Bumble Bees," one of many that he considered over the rather long period during which he contemplated publication. In "Cedar-Plums—Names," one of the short essays in the collection, he discusses some of his difficulties with coherence and titling.



Whitman Archive Title: Wood Odors
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00002
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 3
Repository Title: Wood Odors Poem
Date: ca. 1875
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A draft of a poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime entitled "Wood Odors." The poem was apparently written as Whitman was making notes for his 1882-1883 book, Specimen Days & Collect. Specifically, the poem appears to respond to the visit he made to the Stafford farm in New Jersey in the mid-1870s. Some have argued that this draft is not a poem at all, but a list of phrases toward the composition of Specimen Days & Collect (see David Goodale, "Wood Odors," Walt Whitman Review 8 [March 1962], 17). "Wood Odors" was published first in Harper's Magazine 221 (December 1960), 43.



Whitman Archive Title: [Among the many]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00004
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Among the many aspects of thought…
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On one side of the leaves, Whitman explores the idea that life, with its petty concerns, is "an exercise, a training & development" for an afterlife. A note at the top possibly indicates that the poet considered developing this thought in conjunction with "From Noon to Starry Night," a cluster that first appeared in the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. Edward F. Grier suggests, alternatively, that the writing is connected with Specimen Days (1882–83), "which is full of references to stars" (Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Edward F. Grier, ed. [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2106). The writing on the reverse sides of the leaves explores the ideal roles of authors and the general public in shaping government and legislation. These notes are possibly related to Democratic Vistas, in which Whitman discusses the role of what he calls here the literary class in connection to democracy, as well as issues of voting and women's rights. The two leaves are housed and described separately at the repository.


Specimen Days & Collect (separate volume)

Whitman Archive Title: [Camden Notebook]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05506
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Echoes & Drift]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05541
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Dec 22 '79]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05505
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Spirit That Form'd This Scene

Whitman Archive Title: Spirit that form'd this scene
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00300
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Spirit That Form'd This Scene (1881). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A late draft of "Spirit That Form'd this Scene," which was first published in 1881, written in ink on one side of a sheet and signed in full.



Whitman Archive Title: Spirit that form'd this scene
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00615
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Spirit That Form'd This Scene (1881). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of "Spirit That Form'd this Scene," which was first published in 1881, written in ink on sheets made from pasting together five strips pasted onto another sheet of paper. The date 1881 appears at the top of the sheet.



Whitman Archive Title: [the arch, the column]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00616
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Spirit That Form'd This Scene (1881). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An early draft of lines related to "Spirit That Form'd this Scene," which was first published in 1881, written in ink and pencil.



Whitman Archive Title: Spirit That Form'd This Scene
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00131
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Spirit That Form'd This Scene (1881). A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1879-1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of "Spirit That Form'd This Scene" written in ink, with a few changes, on a writing surface made by pasting together various strips cut from larger sheets. The poem was published in 1881.


Spontaneous Me

Whitman Archive Title: content to the ground
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00040
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: between 1845 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: The phrase "content to the ground," which is visually distinct from the other words on this leaf, appears in the poem eventually titled "Spontaneous Me." Some of the terms in the list at the bottom of the scrap were added to the poem eventually titled "A Song for Occupations" in 1856. In 1867, "blacksmithing" was also added, but two of the terms that are struck through on this manuscrpit ("saltmaking" and "arsenal") were dropped.



Whitman Archive Title: Loveblows
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00122
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: Loveblows Loveblossoms
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Several words from this manuscript ("loveroot," "silkthread," "crotch," and "vine") were used in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that was later titled "Song of Myself." Other lines and words became part of the opening lines of "Broad-Axe Poem" and "Bunch Poem" in the 1856 edition (later titled "Song of the Broad-Axe" and "Spontaneous Me"). The date of the manuscript is therefore probably before or early in 1855. This manuscript is pasted down, so an image of the back of the leaf is currently unavailable.


Spring Overtures—Recreations

Whitman Archive Title: [Feb 11—The first chirping]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00046
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 61
Repository Title: The first chirping
Date: 1877
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes dated February 10–11, 1877, which read like a series of journal entries. These notes compose a partial draft of "Spring Overtures—Recreations," a prose piece which first appeared in the 29 January 1881 issue of The Critic, as "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes. (No. 1)," under the heading "Spring Overtures." These notes describing the onset of spring were revised and later published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). "Spring Overtures—Recreations" was finally appeared in Complete Prose Works (1892). On the verso of this manuscript is a partial sketch of a building, with measurements and notes in Whitman's hand.


Starry Union

Whitman Archive Title: Union Union!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00095
Repository: Library of Congress: George S. Hellman Collection
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 23.5 x 13 cm, Handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Experimental lines and phrases for a poem, beginning "Union Union!" and bearing an unknown relationship to Whitman's published work. On the verso is a title reading "Old Time Gleanings" with the subtitle "Reminiscences, Gossip, Traditions, &c. of the Delaware river, Camden, and New Jersey generally."



Whitman Archive Title: Three Verses
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00071
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository ID: #3829
Date: 1860s or 1870s
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 22.5 x 13.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript seems to comprise notes and draft lines for two poems: "[One?] Song—Come Philander" and "Three verses." The poems were apparently never further developed and were never published. The leaf has been folded in half, and the verso contains two independent texts. One is a list of names and addresses including family members, friends, and supporters. The other seems to be notes for a newspaper announcement, beginning "Walt Whitman, after an absence of almost three years, appeared again on Pennsylvania Avenue this forenoon." Based on this date it can be speculated that the notes were written late in 1875 (a possibility corroborated by the list of names), but the poem(s) may have been inscribed in the late 1860s or earlier.



Whitman Archive Title: Hands Round
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00024
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 24
Date: Between 1865 and 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A manuscript poem with a patriotic theme left unpublished in Whitman's lifetime.



Whitman Archive Title: What the word of power unbroken
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00077
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 167
Date: about 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains lines of an unpublished poem celebrating the Union, a theme also found in the poetry manuscripts titled "Hands Round" and "Starry Union." The lines were probably drafted for the Centennial of 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Starry Union
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00110
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: Starry Union
Date: probably after 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Draft lines, heavily revised, for a poem titled "Starry Union." Originally a single leaf, the top third has become detached. "Starry Union" was never published in Whitman's lifetime, though several different draft forms exist.



Whitman Archive Title: Starry Union
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00007
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository ID: MA 518.4
Date: 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of a poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime but existing in various draft states, including one with the same title in the T. E. Hanley Collection at the University of Texas and another, titled "Hands Ro[und]," in the Trent Collection at Duke University. The precise date of composition is unknown, but Whitman very possibly wrote this piece for the Centennial Celebration of 1876, as the date of the letter on the reverse ("Feb 11/76") suggests.


Starting from Paumanok

Whitman Archive Title: his poem of the
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05619
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 1
Folder: Untitled and Unidentified
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: Proem
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00020
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 12mo 15
Date: about 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These notes on sights in Manhattan and the themes of personality, egotism, and the equality of women may have contributed to what ultimately became "Starting from Paumanok," Section 12. The poem first appeared in the 1860 edition as "Proto-Leaf."



Whitman Archive Title: [(illeg.) Dick Hunt]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00028
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: 1857 Trial Lines and Descriptions
Date: 1856-1857
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 90 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 246–280, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "To a Common Prostitute," "You Felons on Trial in Courts," "Starting from Paumanok," "Trickle Drops," "I Was Looking for a Long While," "Poem of Joys," "Facing West from California's Shores," "To the States," "A Song of the Rolling Earth," "On the Beach a Night Alone," "Full of Life Now," and "With Antecedents."



Whitman Archive Title: 9th av.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00354
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Undated Thoughts, Ideas, and Trial lines (3 V.)
Date: between 1854 and 1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 45 leaves, handwritten
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Content: An early notebook Whitman used for various purposes. William White, in his edition of Whitman's Daybooks and Notebooks (New York: New York University Press, 1978. 3 vols.), noted a relationship between rough drafts of poems in this notebook (called "An Early Notebook" in White's edition) and the 1860 poem eventually titled "Starting from Paumanok." On surface 54 is a passage that seems to have contributed to the 1860 poem that became "Song at Sunset." On surface 85 is a passage that perhaps contributed to the 1855 poem later titled "Song of Myself," and a passage on surface 62 might have been used in the 1856 poem eventually titled "Miracles." Because Whitman wrote entries from both ends of the notebook, the writing on about half of the leaves is upside-down in relation to other leaves. Some leaves have become disbound, and their original positions are uncertain. Our ordering is based on the earliest known transcription, done by Fredson Bowers in 1955.



Whitman Archive Title: [George Walker]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00143
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 37
Folder: 1855-1856, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry trial lines
Date: between 1855-1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 45 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:226–243, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Starting from Paumanok," "A Song for Occupations," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Salut au Monde!," "To One Shortly to Die," and "A Woman Waits for Me."



Whitman Archive Title: [All tends to the soul]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00059
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of a poem about the relationship of the soul to the material world. This manuscript contributed to the poem "Proto-Leaf," which was first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass and eventually titled "Starting from Paumanok."



Whitman Archive Title: Poem of Materials
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00042
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 12mo 15
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains notes for poetry, including phrases which appear in section 6 of the final version of"Starting from Paumanok" and in "Mediums." The published version of "Mediums," originally "Chants Democratic No. 16" in the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass, later appeared as part of "Passage to India" (1871–1872), and finally in the 1881–1882 edition of Leaves of Grass. "Starting from Paumanok" was published first in the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass as "Proto-Leaf." The reverse is a prose fragment dealing with political independence that contains phrases and ideas similar to those found in Whitman's complete but unpublished essay "The Eighteenth Presidency!"



Whitman Archive Title: [To this continent comes the]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00275
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: 1856-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 10 x 13 cm pasted to 5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These lines share common ideas expressed throughout Leaves of Grass, especially in many of the new poems to the 1860 edition. The strongest verbal echoes appear in the poem "So long!" which expresses very similar ideas and the common words "menacing" and "offspring." The printed words "Leaves of" appearing on the verso indicate that Whitman composed this draft on a piece of paper cover from the 1855 edition.



Whitman Archive Title: Premonition
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00179
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
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
Content: Thirty-three manuscript leaves numbered consecutively by Whitman in the lower left corner. "Premonition" was published as the introductory poem to the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass under the title "Proto-Leaf." In the 1867 and later editions it appeared directly after the opening poem "Inscription" as "Starting from Paumanok." On the verso of leaf 15 and part of leaf 16 appears a draft of what would become section 11 of "Calamus" in the 1860 Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: [Once I passed through a populous]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00183
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The recto verses appearing on this manuscript became the main section 9 of "Enfans d'Adam" in 1860 and were retitled "Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City" in 1867. On the verso appear two fragments: an undeleted verse that would be used in Satan's section of "Chanting the Square Deific" in "Sequel to Drum-Taps" (1865-66); and what would become section 23 of "Proto-Leaf", which becomes "Starting from Paumanok" in 1867. The undeleted verse is upside-down relative to the deleted section.



Whitman Archive Title: Thought [Of closing up my songs by these]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00190
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, leaf 1 9 x 12.5 cm pasted to 17.5 x 13.5 cm, leaf 2 21 x 13.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: The paste-on revision contains an expanded version of the original lines Whitman cut away and apparently discarded. The verso of the paste-on section contains, five undeleted draft lines that would become the final verses of "Proto-Leaf" in the 1860 Leaves of Grass; Whitman's small note in the lower-right corner, in a semi-circle, reads "end of Poem." These "Thought" lines became section 11 of "Chants Democratic" in 1860. In the 1867 Leaves of Grass Whitman combined it with the second "Thought" to form the poem "Thoughts" in the supplement "Songs Before Parting." In 1871 "Thoughts" appeared in the cluster "Songs of Parting" within the main body of Leaves of Grass, and in 1881, it achieved its final position within that cluster.



Whitman Archive Title: [O I must not forget]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00286
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman's use of the tax form and the strong similarity this fragment bears both to the 1856 "Poem of the Road" (later "Song of the Open Road") and to the 1860 "Proto-Leaf" (eventually "Starting from Paumanok") indicate that this may have been a revision of the former poem or, as seems more likely, an early draft of "Proto-Leaf" intended for the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Starting from Paumanok
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00301
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Starting from Paumanok (1880). A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Bound proof corrected extensively in Whitman's hand. This correction was probably for the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Starting From Paumanok, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof—." "Starting From Paumanok" was first published as "Proto-Leaf"in 1860.


Straw-Color'd and other Psyches

Whitman Archive Title: Butterflies
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00069
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 40
Repository Title: Butterflies (now taking the place)
Date: 1877–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two small scraps of paper pasted together to make one leaf. Whitman revised these notes and used them in "Straw-Color'd and Other Psyches," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and included in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [White Butterflies]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00068
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 40
Repository Title: Over the glistening bronze brook
Date: 1878–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Notes on butterflies that Whitman revised and used in "Straw-Color'd and Other Psyches," which appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) before appearing in Complete Prose Works (1892).


string of Poems, A

Whitman Archive Title: A string of Poems
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00115
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: A string of Poems
Date: before 1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This scrap reads, in its entirety, "A string of Poems (short, etc.), embodying the amative love of woman—the same as Live Oak Leaves do the passion of friendship for man." Since, as Fredson Bowers points out in his introduction to Whitman's Manuscripts: "Leaves of Grass" (1860): A Parallel Text (lxxiii-lxxiv), Whitman dropped the title "Live Oak Leaves" in late spring, 1859, and adopted calamus as his symbol of manly love, the date must be earlier.


strong right, The

Whitman Archive Title: [the strong right]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00369
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


such a thing as ownership

Whitman Archive Title: such a thing as ownership
Whitman Archive ID: med.00740
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: A manuscript known only from a transcription published by Clifton Joseph Furness in Walt Whitman's Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts (Harvard University Press, 1928), 45. Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances or date of its composition, but Edward Grier speculates that it was written in period leading up to the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 because "the idea expressed is one that occupied [Whitman's] mind while he was preparing" that edition. See Grier, ed. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York University, 1984), 1:120.


Such things

Whitman Archive Title: such things
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00167
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: Model American
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This heavily revised manuscript contains prose notes describing the "mental and moral connexions" between America and other lands. While dating the manuscript is difficult, Whitman's use of the phrase "full sized men and women" suggests a composition date from the 1850s, as he used a similar phrase in the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in his 1856 reply to Emerson's letter of praise for the first edition of Leaves, and in the poem "Song of the Broad-Axe" (1856). Thus, the manuscript likely dates from sometime in the 1850s. However, it does not seem that this manuscript directly contributed to any of those works.


Suggestions

Whitman Archive Title: Rules for Composition
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00130
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 136
Date: Early 1850s
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: In this manuscript (likely from the early 1850s), Whitman describes his views on style and composition. His comments about the importance of a lack of "ornament" in literature are similar to lines from the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman reworked some of those ideas on ornament and they appeared in the poem "Says" in the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves. The poem was later retitled "Suggestions" and was retained in Leaves until 1872 but thereafter was excluded.



Whitman Archive Title: In Future Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: med.00784
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: 1855–1871
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Notes on a future edition of Leaves of Grass in which Whitman insists that the "divine style" is one without ornament. In the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes about literary ornaments, concluding that "most works are most beautiful without ornament." Whitman reworked some of these ideas on ornament and they appear in the poem, "Suggestions," which initially appeared in Leaves of Grass (1860) as "Says." This poem was retained in Leaves of Grass until 1872 and thereafter was excluded. This manuscript is known only from a transcription published by Richard Maurice Bucke in Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 69.



Whitman Archive Title: Says
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00227
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21 x 12.5 cm to 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These manuscript lines were revised to form numbered sections 1 through 4 of the ungrouped poem "Says" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman cut four verse paragraphs from the poem in the 1867 Leaves of Grass version; from that point on the shortened poem appeared, ungrouped, under the title "Suggestions" until its final appearance in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Says
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00228
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 12.5 cm to 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These manuscript lines were revised to form numbered section 5 of the ungrouped poem "Says" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman cut four verse paragraphs in the 1867 Leaves of Grass version; from that point on the shortened poem appeared, ungrouped, under the title "Suggestions" until its final appearance in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Says
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00229
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 12.5 cm to 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These manuscript lines were revised to form numbered section 6 of the ungrouped poem "Says" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman cut four verse paragraphs in the 1867 Leaves of Grass version; from that point on the shortened poem appeared, ungrouped, under the title "Suggestions" until its final appearance in 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Says
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00230
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 12.5 cm to 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These manuscript lines were revised to form numbered section 7 of the ungrouped poem "Says" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman cut four verse paragraphs in the 1867 Leaves of Grass version; from that point on the shortened poem appeared, ungrouped, under the title "Suggestions" until its final appearance in 1876. The cancelled lines on the top section of the manuscript appear to be a draft of lines that were never published but that bear great resemblance to the various "Thoughts" and "Thought (Of . . .)" poems Whitman published throughout the many editions of Leaves of Grass.


Sun-Bath—Nakedness, A

Whitman Archive Title: [Sunday Aug 27 '77]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00048
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 64
Repository Title: Another happy day
Repository ID: 72/234 z 1:64
Date: 1877
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A heavily revised draft fragment of "A Sun-Bath—Nakedness." Much of this manuscript was first published in the 9 April 1881 issue of The Critic under the title "How I Get Around at Sixty and Take Notes. (No. 2)." Revised portions of this draft were used as the first paragraph of the section titled "Convalescent Hours." Whitman further revised these notes before publishing them in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) as "A Sun-Bath—Nakedness," which eventually appeared in Complete Prose Works (1892). On the verso of this manuscript is a letter fragment from George G. Clapp to Whitman.



Whitman Archive Title: Convalescent hours
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00331
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 122
Date: 1877
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is a draft of the first paragraph of "A Sun-Bath—Nakedness," published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882).



Whitman Archive Title: A Sun-Bath—Nakedness
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00050
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 65
Repository Title: A Sun-Bath—Nakedness
Date: 1878
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Content: Heavily revised prose notes written on various scraps of paper, including a letter fragment and an envelope addressed to Whitman, some of which have been pasted together to create larger sheets. Together these leaves comprise a nearly complete draft of "A Sun-Bath—Nakedness," which Whitman published as part of Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and later collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). Though Whitman dates a portion of these manuscript notes July 18, 1878, this prose piece was published in Specimen Days under the date, August 27, 1877. The verso of the third leaf contains a fragment of a letter to Whitman from an unknown correspondent, whose closing signature has been obscured. This item is catalogued as three separate manuscripts in the Livezey collection; however, as they seem to form a continuous and nearly complete draft, we have grouped them together as one item.


Sundown Perfume—Quail-Notes—the Hermit Thrush

Whitman Archive Title: [—the silent darting of many sand swallows]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00032
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 47
Repository Title: The silent darting of many sand swallows
Date: ca. 1876–1877
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Prose notes in which Whitman provides a detailed sensory description of a pastoral setting, possibly the "charmingly recluse and rural spot along Timber Creek" where Whitman spent restorative time in the mid- to late-1870s. Lines from this manuscript appeared in "Sundown Perfume—Quail-Notes—The Hermit-Thrush," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), which was later collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). On the verso of the third leaf is a corrected proof of "The Singer in the Prison," also described in this finding aid (see the entry for ucb.00001).


Swallows on the River

Whitman Archive Title: Sept. 3 '79—Cloudy and wet
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00076
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 79
Repository Title: Cloudy and wet, wind due east
Date: about 1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A draft of "Swallows on the River," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: for Sparrows
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00078
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 81
Repository Title: In the midst of the 22nd book
Date: about 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes that contributed to "Swallows on the River," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Sparrows—Swallows
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00077
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 46
Repository Title: Toronto...in the bookstore on king
Date: about 1880
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes that contributed to "Swallows on the River," first published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), and collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Sword-Calls

Whitman Archive Title: Sword-Calls
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00308
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Sword Calls (1863-64). A.MS. draft and notes.
Date: between 1863-1864
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Draft and notes for an unpublished poem titled "Sword-Calls" written in ink on a large sheet from a notebook (second sheet blank), and in pencil (with "Sword-Calls" in red ink) on another smaller leaf.


talent for conversation, A

Whitman Archive Title: A talent for conversation
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00026
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1840 and 1870
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A brief manuscript scrap with no known connection to Whitman's published work. This manuscript is difficult to date conclusively, but Edward Grier suggests that "this sort of moralizing . . . belongs to [Whitman's] journalizing of the 1840s through the 1860s" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:295).


tar, turpentine

Whitman Archive Title: Tar, turpentine, shingles
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00037
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Notes, probably toward a poem, mentioning building materials from North Carolina, slaves driving carts, a lumber boat, and a pack of dogs ready for a slave hunt.


Tests

Whitman Archive Title: Tests
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00007
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository ID: HM 11203
Date: ca. 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft, with a few corrections, of "Tests," a poem published first in Leaves of Grass (1860–61) and reprinted in subsequent editions.


Thanks in Old Age

Whitman Archive Title: Thanks in Old Age
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00087
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: Thanks in Old Age
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, proof with handwritten comment
View images: 1
Content: Proof with handwritten note about publication date by Whitman.



Whitman Archive Title: Thanks in Old Age
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01081
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Thanks in Old Age (1888). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A proof sheet of "Thanks in Old Age" that features a single correction—a comma added after the word "retrospective." The poem was published first in 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: [Thanks in old age]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00074
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: bv2
Folder:
Repository Title: Thanks in Old Age
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Heavily revised draft of approximately seven lines of the poem "Thanks in Old Age," which was first published on 24 November 1887 in the Philadelphia Press. It was reprinted in the New York World on 23 November 1890 under the title "Walt Whitman's Thanksgiving" and in the so-called deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (1891–92) under its original title. This manuscript has been pasted to a backing sheet and no image of the verso is available.



Whitman Archive Title: Thanks in Old Age
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01116
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Thanks in Old Age (1887). Printed Copy.
Date: November 24, 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A clipping from the November 24, 1887 issue of The Republican with Whitman's poem "Thanks in Old Age." The date of the issue is noted in Whitman's hand in the margin.


That Music Always Round Me

Whitman Archive Title: [Never fails]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00253
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 14 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The lines, deleted with a single pencil stroke, appear after revision and expansion to have eventually formed part of section 21 of the cluster "Calamus" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass; in the 1867 edition this section received the title "That Music Always Round Me."



Whitman Archive Title: As of Eternity
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00307
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two leaves of pink paper, both 21 x 13 cm, in black ink, with minor revisions in the same ink. Pinholes mostly in center and at top of both pages. This poem became section 21 of "Calamus" in 1860; the lines on the first manuscript page became verses 1-6, and those on the second ("I hear not the volumes of/ sound merely—...") became 7-9. Retitled "That Music Always Round Me" in 1867, it was transferred in 1871 to the "Whispers of Heavenly Death" cluster in Passage to India. In 1881 Whitman incorporated it, with the rest of the cluster, in the main body of Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


That Shadow My Likeness

Whitman Archive Title: [That shadow]
Whitman Archive ID:
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 17 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: One one leaf of lined light blue wove paper (17 x 9.5 cm), in pencil, with one pencil revision. Only two sets of pinholes, both in center. This was revised to become section 40 of "Calamus" in 1860; in 1867 it was retitled "That Shadow, My Likeness."



Whitman Archive Title: [June 26 '59]
Whitman Archive ID: med.00774
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: about 1859
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Edward F. Grier includes a transcription of this missing manuscript in Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York University, 1984), 405–410. Grier's transcription is pieced together from "photostats of six surviving pages" (held in the Harned collection at the Library of Congress) and from two partial transcriptions, made by Emory Holloway and currently held at the University of Kansas, as well as Clifton Joseph Furness's Walt Whitman's Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts (Harvard University Press, 1928) and Emory Holloway's The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (Doubleday, Page & Company, 1921). This manuscript includes an early draft of "In Paths Untrodden," first published as the first section of "Calamus" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Also included in this manuscript is a draft of "That Shadow My Likeness," first published in New-York Saturday Press 4 February 1860 as "Poemet." This poem later appeared as "Calamus No. 40," Leaves of Grass (1860); as "That Shadow My Likeness," Leaves of Grass (1867); and, with slight changes in the text, in Leaves of Grass (1881–1882). Other portions of this manuscript are suggestive of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", first published in New-York Saturday Press (24 December 1859) as "A Child's Reminiscence." This poem later appeared as "A Word Out of the Sea," Leaves of Grass (1860); as "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," in "Sea-Shore Memories," Passage to India (1871); and finally in "Sea-Drift," Leaves of Grass (1881–1882).


The Carpenter's and

Whitman Archive Title: The carpenter's and
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00256
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 30
Date: between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Manuscript containing ideas for a poem about architecture, carpentry, and masonry. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Song. An image of the verso is not available."


The most Jubilant Triumphant Poem

Whitman Archive Title: The most Jubilant Triumphant Poem
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00265
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: 1860 or before
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript with ideas for a poem meant to express different forms of "great jubilant glee." The connection between this manuscript and Whitman's published works is unknown. This fragment has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Poem of a proud."


Then Last of All

Whitman Archive Title: [Then deeper]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04167
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Nor you and trail of yours]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04156
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [swell and ebb!]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04159
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [To you your cosmic]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05114
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Gaily the outward bound]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05115
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [and deeper still]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00054
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a revised draft of the poem "Then Last of All," published as part of "Fancies at Navesink" in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. This manuscript is bound with others under the title "Fancies at Navesink."



Whitman Archive Title: [last—Dec 11]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00055
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a revised draft of the poem "Then Last of All," published as part of "Fancies at Navesink" in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century. The verso of this manuscript is an advertisement for Whitman's book, Drum-Taps. This manuscript is bound with others under the title "Fancies at Navesink."


There was a Child Went Forth

Whitman Archive Title: Talbot Wilson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00141
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: The horizon's edge
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00265
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8.5 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript includes drafts of lines used in the first and tenth poems in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself" and "There Was a Child Went Forth," respectively.



Whitman Archive Title: (Poem) Shadows
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00119
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: (Poem) ? Reflections Shadows
Date: Between 1850 and 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript may have been written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The description of the plate-glass windows on Broadway bears some resemblance to a description in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." This manuscript also bears a distant resemblance to a discussion of "shadows" in the poem later titled "There Was a Child Went Forth." It is also possible that the manuscript was written later, however: the description of Broadway in these lines also closely resembles a description Whitman wrote in his unfinished poem known as "The Two Vaults," a poem that is recorded in a New York notebook (loc.00348) that probably dates to the early 1860s. Whitman also wrote about Broadway elsewhere in later poems, so the manuscript may have been written still later. The manuscript has been pasted down, so an image of the back of the leaf is currently unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: [med Cophósis]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00005
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, Before 1855, Women
Date: Between 1852 and 1854
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These pages were written by Whitman in the early to mid-1850s. William White described the pages as "torn from a tall notebook" (Daybooks and Notebooks [New York: New York University Press, 1978], 773–777). White noted a relationship between these pages and the poems "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Song of the Answerer," and "There Was a Child Went Forth." Some of the ideas and language being worked out here also appear in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." For a discussion of the dating and importance of this notebook, see Matt Miller, Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 11–16.



Whitman Archive Title: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


These Carols

Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 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
Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


These I Singing in Spring

Whitman Archive Title: [These I, singing in spring]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00330
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, 20 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These leaves comprise four sections of a poem inscribed on the first and third sides of two folded half-sheets (20 x 16 cm) of the same white wove paper used for 1:3:1 and 1:3:2, in the same light brown ink and, like them, with only minor revisions. The pages were folded and pinned together to form a small pamphlet. Pinholes mostly at center-top and in what was the left margin of the pamphlet. The lines on page 1 became verses 1-8 of section 4 of "Calamus." in 1860; page 2 ("Solitary, smelling the earthy/ smell,...") became verses 9-14; page 3 ("Here lilac with a branch of/ pine,") became verses 15-22; and page 4 ("And stems of currants, and/ plum-blows,") became verses 23-28. From 1867 on the poem was titled "These I, Singing in Spring."


Thick-Sprinkled Bunting

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


Think of the Soul

Whitman Archive Title: [As procreation]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00281
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 6 x 18.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The ideas expressed in this manuscript may have been used in the 1856 "Poem of Remembrances for A Girl or A Boy of These States," which became the sixth poem in "Chants Democratic and Native American" in 1860. It was subsequently shortened by several stanzas (1867) and retitled (1872) "Think of the Soul" before being excluded from Leaves of Grass with the publication of the 1881 edition.


This Compost

Whitman Archive Title: Talbot Wilson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00141
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: O Mother, did you think
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00034
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 13
Date: about 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: On four leaves, an early version of portions of the poem ultimately titled "This Compost," first printed under the title "Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of The Wheat" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. On the reverse sides of these leaves is a list of words regarding the physical body and connected in concept to "I Sing the Body Electric," a poem that first appeared as the fourth poem of the 1855 Leaves of Grass. With this list, Whitman was gathering material for the noteworthy final section, a paean to body parts, that he added to the poem in 1856. Glue residue shows that these leaves were formerly pasted to two other leaves, upon which is written a prose manuscript fragment regarding California Vigilance Committees.



Whitman Archive Title: [the scope of government]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00157
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 37
Folder: 1855-1856 (?), Government, Nature, Trial Lines, Self-Advice
Date: between 1855-1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 20 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984. 6 vols.), noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Assurances," "This Compost," and an unfinished poem entitled "The Insects. On some of the leaves Whitman has rotated the notebook and written upside down."


This Day, O Soul

Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, handwritten
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Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful

Whitman Archive Title: [This moment as I sit alone]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00331
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper, in dark brown ink, with revisions in pencil. Pinholes in center and at top. Whitman penciled in the number 6 in the lower-left corner. The fourth poem in the original sequence "Live Oak, with Moss" (with ornamental Roman numeral), it became section 23 of "Calamus" in 1860 and was permanently retitled "This Moment, Yearning and Thoughtful" in 1867.


This singular young man was

Whitman Archive Title: This singular young man
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00120
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: "This singular young man was unnoted for any strong qualities"
Date: 1840s or early 1850s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript was first printed, in two separate segments, in Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., 1899, 114–115, 116–117. Bucke dates the manuscript to the 1840s. It is possibly a draft of an early piece of fiction, but no connection to Whitman's known published works has been established.


This western two-thirds

Whitman Archive Title: This western two-thirds
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05340
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood

Whitman Archive Title: [Land of the potent-large!]
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00001
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 1
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript includes a fragment of a poem, approximately seven lines, that is possibly from an early draft of "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free," a poem Whitman originally wrote for the June 1872 Dartmouth College commencement exercises. This poem was later revised and published as "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood," Leaves of Grass (1881–1882).



Whitman Archive Title: [the Idea of All]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00021
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 142
Date: about 1872
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 16 leaves, 6.25 x 3.5 in., handwritten
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Content: These leaves are pages from a top-bound notebook containing draft lines of poetry, apparently for a poem delivered at the Dartmouth College commencement in June 1872 and first published under the title, "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free," later revised and published as "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood." Many of the pages have been cut out or trimmed, and seven envelope faces have been attached at the back of the notebook.



Whitman Archive Title: [Thee, in thy orbic singers]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00310
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Thou Mother With thy Equal Brood (1872). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1872
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: A draft of lines that would appear, in a revised form, first in "As A Strong Bird on Pinions Free" in 1872, and later under the title "Thou Mother With Thy Equal Brood." The leaf consists of two clipped scraps pasted together, and the upper part of the leaf is pasted to a yellow backing sheet that bears writing and sketches in the hand of Horace Traubel. Our images show the front of the leaf, that part of the back visible by lifting the lower part of the leaf, and the reverse side of the backing sheet.



Whitman Archive Title: [The Time and Lands]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00113
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 8
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: about 1872
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 18.5 x 18.5 cm to 20 x 18 cm, handwritten
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Content: The first two entries on Leaf 1 appear to contain general notes for a poem; the second entry reads, "Make a demand for the Ideal, (or rather idea of the Ideal of the real)." The lines are followed by the note "in the piece," which leads up to several trial verses eventually incorporated in the second verse paragraph of numbered section 5 of "Thou Mother With Thy Equal Brood." The accompanying leaf contains general notes about creating a song or chant to celebrate America and her "best men." A cartoon hand singles out the lines "All the states / East & west, / north & south / Brotherhood / an equal union" which prefigure the whole poem, but particularly such lines as "South, North, West, East, / (To thy immortal breasts, Mother of All, thy every daughter, / son, endear'd alike, forever equal,)" in the same section projected on Leaf 1. The poem "Thou Mother With Thy Equal Brood" was composed with the title "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free" and presented as the Dartmouth commencement poem on June 26, 1872. The poem was first published in a volume of the same name with seven other poems also in 1872.



Whitman Archive Title: America! thee formulating
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00621
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00003
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Box: Manuscript box.
Date: around 1872
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A copy of "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free" with directions to the printer, as returned to Whitman from the printing office. "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free" was first published in the New York Herald on 26 June 1872. Afterward the poem was published with seven others in a pamphlet, As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free (1872). It was later included as a supplement bound with Two Rivulets (1876). Later, Whitman changed the title to "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood," added a new opening stanza, made additional revisions, and incorporated the poem into Leaves of Grass (1881–82). This manuscript was presented by the author to Richard J. Hinton, who in turn presented it to J. H. Johnston.



Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman's poem to-day at Dartmouth College
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00327
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 118
Date: 1872
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 7 leaves, handwritten, printed
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Content: A draft of "Walt Whitman's Poem Today at Dartmouth College," an essay announcing the commencement poem Whitman delivered at Dartmouth June 26, 1872. This piece was published in the 26 June 1872 issue of the Washington Evening Star and includes excerpts from Whitman's poem, "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood," originally published in the New York Herald 26 June 1872 under the title "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free." This poem was later published with seven other poems in a pamphlet, As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free (1872). It was also included in a supplement bound with Two Rivulets (1876). Whitman eventually changed the title to "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood," added a new opening stanza, made additional revisions, and incorporated the poem into Leaves of Grass (1881–82).



Whitman Archive Title: Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood
Whitman Archive ID: wau.00001
Repository: Washington University: George N. Meissner Collection, Department of Special Collections
Date: 1880–1882
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 8 leaves, handwritten, printed
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Content: This is a printed proof with heavy corrections in Whitman's hand of the poem, "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood," which was first published in the New York Herald (26 June 1872), under the title, "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free." On that same date, Whitman delivered the poem at the Dartmouth College commencement. Whitman published it later that year as the title poem in a small book, As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free: and Other Poems (1872). The title was later revised to "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood" when the poem was included in Leaves of Grass in 1881–1882.



Whitman Archive Title: [Lo, where arise three peerless stars]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00112
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 55
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1886
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25 x 19.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript is a signed fair copy of three verses from numbered section 6 of the 1881 Leaves of Grass version of a poem published under the title "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood"; his note "Leaves of Grass/ page 350," corresponding to the pagination of the 1881 edition, appears beneath the lines. Whitman seems to have prepared this copy for an admirer, with his signature appearing in huge letters above the lines "Camden New Jersey / April 19 1886—."


Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling

Whitman Archive Title: Thou Orb Aloft
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00084
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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
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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."


Thou West that gave'st him

Whitman Archive Title: Thou West that gave'st him to us
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07461
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Beat! Beat! Drums! (1861). A. MS. draft.
Date: 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript consists of poetic lines on the death of Abraham Lincoln, lines that begin with the words "Thou West that gave'st him to us." The lines were not published during Whitman's lifetime, and although they focus on Lincoln's death, do not share direct similarities with "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" or other poems in the "Memories of President Lincoln" cluster. The lines were posthumously published in a Facsimile Edition of Drum-Taps in 1959. On the reverse of this leaf (loc.00051) is a draft of the first stanza of the poem "Beat! Beat! Drums!"


Thought of Columbus, A

Whitman Archive Title: A Thought of Columbus
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00070
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 5
Repository ID: #3829
Date: 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12.5 cm x 25 cm, handwritten
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Content: A draft of "A Thought of Columbus," a poem first published on July 16, 1892, in Once a Week, accompanied by Horace Traubel's account of its composition, called "Walt Whitman's Last Poem." This manuscript is a draft of only the first six lines and is dated 1891.



Whitman Archive Title: [The tangled long]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00329
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: A Thought of Columbus (1892). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: A draft line for "A Thought of Columbus." According to Horace Traubel, this was the last poem Whitman wrote. It was published first in 1892. On the verso is a letter from Henry Hopkins dated November 2, 1891.



Whitman Archive Title: [Deep mystery of mysteries!]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00330
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: A Thought of Columbus (1892). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: A draft of lines for "A Thought of Columbus." According to Horace Traubel, this was the last poem Whitman wrote. It was published first in 1892. On the verso is the end of an undated letter from Mrs. John M. Gardner.



Whitman Archive Title: [Reck'd]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00331
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: A Thought of Columbus (1892). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines for "A Thought of Columbus." According to Horace Traubel, this was the last poem Whitman wrote. It was published first in 1892. On the verso is a cut away, undated letter.



Whitman Archive Title: [An impulse thrilling]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00332
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: A Thought of Columbus (1892). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines for "A Thought of Columbus." According to Horace Traubel, this was the last poem Whitman wrote. It was published first in 1892. On the verso is a cut away, undated letter.



Whitman Archive Title: A Thought of Columbus
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00333
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: A Thought of Columbus (1892). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines for "A Thought of Columbus." According to Horace Traubel, this was the last poem Whitman wrote. It was published first in 1892.



Whitman Archive Title: [The mystery of mysteries!]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00334
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: A Thought of Columbus (1892). A.MS. drafts.
Date: about 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of lines for "A Thought of Columbus." According to Horace Traubel, this was the last poem Whitman wrote. It was published first in 1892. The draft is written on an opened-up envelope from J. H. Johnston postmarked October 30, 1891.



Whitman Archive Title: A Thought of Columbus
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00328
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: A Thought of Columbus (1892). A.MS. drafts.
Date: 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A complete draft of "A Thought of Columbus" written on two long strips of various fragments pasted together and three smaller pieces. According to Horace Traubel, this was the last poem Whitman wrote. It was published first in 1892.



Whitman Archive Title: Columbus
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00335
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: A Thought of Columbus (1892). A.MS. drafts.
Date: 1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A brown envelope that Horace Traubel said contained the manuscript of "A Thought of Columbus" that Whitman gave him shortly before he died in 1892.


Thought [Of Equality]

Whitman Archive Title: Of Ownership
Whitman Archive ID: amh.00006
Repository: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably composed in the late 1850s or in 1860 as Whitman was preparing the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. It is a draft of No. 4 of the "Thoughts" cluster published first in the 1860 edition. In later editions, Whitman dispersed the individual lines, presenting them as separate poems or incorporating them into newly created poems. In the 1871–1872 Leaves of Grass, the first line appeared as the initial line of "Thoughts [Of ownership]." In the 1881–1882 edition, the second line returned as "Thought [Of Equality];" and the third and fourth lines were titled "Thought [Of Justice]."


Thought [Of Justice]

Whitman Archive Title: Of Ownership
Whitman Archive ID: amh.00006
Repository: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably composed in the late 1850s or in 1860 as Whitman was preparing the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. It is a draft of No. 4 of the "Thoughts" cluster published first in the 1860 edition. In later editions, Whitman dispersed the individual lines, presenting them as separate poems or incorporating them into newly created poems. In the 1871–1872 Leaves of Grass, the first line appeared as the initial line of "Thoughts [Of ownership]." In the 1881–1882 edition, the second line returned as "Thought [Of Equality];" and the third and fourth lines were titled "Thought [Of Justice]."


Thought [Of that to come]

Whitman Archive Title: Thought
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00062
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 28
Date: about 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript left unpublished by Whitman containing draft ideas for a poem. Written on a sheet from the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass.


Thought on Shakspere, A

Whitman Archive Title: A Thought on Shakspere
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00045
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: A Thought on Shakespeare
Repository ID: HM 6712
Date: 1881-1886
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A fairly late draft of the essay "A Thought on Shakspere," which first appeared in The Critic on 14 August 1886. It would later be reprinted in Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers (1888) and again in November Boughs.


Thoughts

Whitman Archive Title: Thoughts
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00002
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository ID: HM 11201
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Draft, with minor corrections, of the first poem in the cluster titled "Thoughts" when it was first published in Leaves of Grass (1860–61). It was reprinted in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass but omitted from all subsequent editions.



Whitman Archive Title: 6
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00003
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Thoughts
Repository ID: HM 11201
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft, with a few corrections, of the sixth poem in the cluster titled "Thoughts" when it was first published in Leaves of Grass (1860–61). In the 1867 edition it appeared again as "6" in the "Thoughts" cluster. In the 1871–72 edition, revised and titled Thought, it was included in the "Songs of Parting" cluster. It did not appear in later editions of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Thoughts
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00004
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository ID: HM 11201
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft, with revisions, of the seventh poem in the cluster titled "Thoughts" when it was first published in Leaves of Grass (1860–61). In the 1867 edition it appeared again as "7" in the "Thoughts" cluster. In the 1871–72 edition it was titled "Thought" and not included in any cluster. Finally, in Leaves of Grass (1881–82) it appeared as "Thought" in the "By the Roadside" cluster.



Whitman Archive Title: 2
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00005
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Thoughts
Repository ID: HM 11201
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft, with minor revisions, of the second poem in the cluster titled "Thoughts" when it was first published in Leaves of Grass (1860–61). In the 1867 and 1871–72 editions it appeared again as "2" in clusters titled "Thoughts." Finally, in Leaves of Grass (1881–82) Whitman combined parts of this and another poem, again titled Thoughts, and included it in the "By the Roadside" cluster.



Whitman Archive Title: Thought [Of these years I sing]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00189
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, leaf 1 21.5 x 13 cm, leaf 2 18.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: Whitman inscribed and circled the note "2d/ piece/ in Book" in the upper-right corner of the first leaf. The small top section is inscribed on the verso of some deleted draft verses excised from "So Long!" "Thought" became section 9 of "Chants Democratic" in 1860. In the 1867 Leaves of Grass Whitman combined it with the second "Thought" to form the poem "Thoughts" in the supplement "Songs Before Parting." (This particular "Thought" was numbered section 1 of the composite poem.) In 1871 "Thoughts" appeared in the cluster "Songs of Parting" within the main body of Leaves of Grass, and in 1881, it achieved its final position within that cluster. These leaves correspond to the verses in the 1860 "Chants Democratic" version.



Whitman Archive Title: Thought [Of closing up my songs by these]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00190
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, leaf 1 9 x 12.5 cm pasted to 17.5 x 13.5 cm, leaf 2 21 x 13.5 cm, handwritten
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Content: The paste-on revision contains an expanded version of the original lines Whitman cut away and apparently discarded. The verso of the paste-on section contains, five undeleted draft lines that would become the final verses of "Proto-Leaf" in the 1860 Leaves of Grass; Whitman's small note in the lower-right corner, in a semi-circle, reads "end of Poem." These "Thought" lines became section 11 of "Chants Democratic" in 1860. In the 1867 Leaves of Grass Whitman combined it with the second "Thought" to form the poem "Thoughts" in the supplement "Songs Before Parting." In 1871 "Thoughts" appeared in the cluster "Songs of Parting" within the main body of Leaves of Grass, and in 1881, it achieved its final position within that cluster.



Whitman Archive Title: Says
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00230
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 12.5 cm to 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
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Content: These manuscript lines were revised to form numbered section 7 of the ungrouped poem "Says" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman cut four verse paragraphs in the 1867 Leaves of Grass version; from that point on the shortened poem appeared, ungrouped, under the title "Suggestions" until its final appearance in 1876. The cancelled lines on the top section of the manuscript appear to be a draft of lines that were never published but that bear great resemblance to the various "Thoughts" and "Thought (Of . . .)" poems Whitman published throughout the many editions of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


Thoughts [Of ownership]

Whitman Archive Title: The only way in which
Whitman Archive ID: rut.00023
Repository: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey: Special Collections and University Archives
Repository ID: Ac.605
Date: Between 1845 and 1860
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Edward Grier suggests that this manuscript was probably written prior to 1860, noting some similarities in language and sentiment between it and the initial line of No. 4 of the "Thoughts" cluster published first in the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:118). The erased final line of the manuscript is also similar to language that appears in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. The manuscript is held at Rutgers University Library along with several similar manuscripts that are numbered sequentially and probably date from around or before 1855: see "American literature must become distinct (rut.00010)," "dithyrambic trochee" (rut.00022), "The money value of real" (rut.00024), and "ground where you may rest" (rut.00025).



Whitman Archive Title: Of Ownership
Whitman Archive ID: amh.00006
Repository: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably composed in the late 1850s or in 1860 as Whitman was preparing the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. It is a draft of No. 4 of the "Thoughts" cluster published first in the 1860 edition. In later editions, Whitman dispersed the individual lines, presenting them as separate poems or incorporating them into newly created poems. In the 1871–1872 Leaves of Grass, the first line appeared as the initial line of "Thoughts [Of ownership]." In the 1881–1882 edition, the second line returned as "Thought [Of Equality];" and the third and fourth lines were titled "Thought [Of Justice]."


Thoughts [Of these years I sing]

Whitman Archive Title: never to be forgotten in lectures
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00795
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 12mo 61
Date: 1855-1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A scrap of poetry with lines that contributed both to the poem ultimately titled "Thoughts [Of these years I sing...]" and to "Apostroph," the opening section of "Chants Democratic and Native American." Both poems first appeared in the 1860–1861 edition of Leaves of Grass. The reverse (duk.00131) contains prose about America's need for "her own poems."


Three Young Men's Deaths

Whitman Archive Title: [To proof reader]
Whitman Archive ID: lcl.00005
Repository: Liverpool Central Library
Repository Title: Three Young Men's Deaths
Repository ID: 811 WAL/1/1
Date: 1878
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: "Three Young Men's Deaths" was a piece that first appeared in April 1879 in Cope's Tobacco Plant, a trade magazine published in Liverpool, England, although Whitman wrote the piece in late 1878. He would later republish it in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and Complete Prose Works (1892). This manuscript is a draft of the short introductory paragraph that appeared before the descriptions of the three young men, and includes a brief note to the proof reader at Cope's; the introduction remained unchanged in subsequent publications.



Whitman Archive Title: Erastus Haskell
Whitman Archive ID: lcl.00003
Repository: Liverpool Central Library
Repository Title: Erastus Haskell
Repository ID: 811 WAL/1/2
Date: 1878
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of the first of three sections of "Three Young Men's Deaths," a piece that first appeared in April 1879 in Cope's Tobacco Plant of Liverpool, England. The piece would later be republished in Specimen Days and Complete Prose Works. The bracketed portion at the top of the manuscript was included in the original publication, and in a slightly altered form in subsequent publications. Whitman claims to be copying the text directly from a letter he sent to his mother on 28 July 1863.



Whitman Archive Title: Three Young Men's Deaths
Whitman Archive ID: lcl.00004
Repository: Liverpool Central Library
Repository Title: Three Young Men's Deaths
Repository ID: 811 WAL/1/5
Date: 1878
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A galley proof with Whitman's handwritten corrections for a portion of "Three Young Men's Deaths," which was first published in Cope's Tobacco Plant of Liverpool, England, in April 1879. The piece would later be republished in Specimen Days and Complete Prose Works.


tip-top caricature, A

Whitman Archive Title: [A tip-top caricature of Walt Whitman]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00077
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 9
Repository Title: A tip-top caricature of Walt Whitman
Repository ID: #3829-h
Date: 1871-1872
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript is a draft of an untitled note that ran in the Washington News and Gossip section of the Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) on November 22, 1872. According to Emory Holloway, the caricature that it describes was printed in the Fifth Avenue Journal in 1872.


'Tis But Ten Years Since (Fourth Paper)

Whitman Archive Title: [to start upon]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00247
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: between 1864 and 1874
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript fragment was originally part of a larger leaf which comprised two other fragments as well: tex.00308 and tex.00297. Before the sheet was cut into three pieces, this fragment formed the lower part. The writing it contains is related to a section headed "Fifty Army Hospitals Here—1863—Spring," a section of the article "'Tis But Ten Years Since. (Fourth Paper.)," published in the New York Weekly Graphic on February 21, 1874. Further revised, it was later published in Memoranda during the War (1875–76) as "Hospital Perplexity." This was reprinted in Two Rivulets (1876), Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), and Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [to start upon]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00297
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: between 1864 and 1874
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript fragment was originally part of a larger leaf which comprised two other fragments as well: tex.00308 and tex.00247. Before the sheet was cut into three pieces, this fragment formed the upper part. The writing it contains is related to a section headed "Specimen of the Army Hospitals Now in and around Washington" in "Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers," an article published in the December 11, 1864 issue of the New York Times. Whitman also used this material in "Still More of the Hospitals," a section of the article "'Tis But Ten Years Since. (Fourth Paper.)," published in the New York Weekly Graphic on February 21, 1874. Further revised, it was later published in Memoranda during the War (1875–76) as "Aug., Sep., and Oct., '63—The Hospitals." This was reprinted, unchanged, in Two Rivulets (1876). Finally, it appeared as "Hospitals Ensemble" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and in Complete Prose Works (1892).

It is uncertain whether Whitman created this manuscript as he drafted material for the 1864 article or wrote it as he worked to synthesize earlier pieces for the "'Tis But Ten Years Since" series, though the latter scenario is more likely.



Whitman Archive Title: [They are frequently changed]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00308
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: between 1864 and 1874
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript fragment was originally part of a larger leaf which comprised two other fragments as well: tex.00297 and tex.00247. Before the sheet was cut into three pieces, this fragment formed the middle part. The writing it contains is related to a section headed "Fifty Army Hospitals Here—1863—Spring," a section of the article "'Tis But Ten Years Since. (Fourth Paper.)," published in the New York Weekly Graphic on February 21, 1874. Further revised, it was later published in Memoranda during the War (1875–76) as "Hospital Perplexity." This was reprinted in Two Rivulets (1876), Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), and Complete Prose Works (1892).


'Tis But Ten Years Since [First Paper]

Whitman Archive Title: [The first actual resident settlement]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00980
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 35
Folder: "Brooklyniana: History of Brooklyn and Long Island," drafts and notes
Date: about 1861
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Notes on the settlement of Brooklyn that may have contributed to the first installment of "Brooklyniana; A Series of Local Articles, Past and Present. No. 1," first published in the Brooklyn Daily Standard on 3 June 1861.



Whitman Archive Title: [The North too will eliminate]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00996
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "Eliminate Fanatics," draft
Date: about 1874
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The recto includes two prose paragraphs that contributed to the first installment of "'Tis But Ten Years Since," which appeared in the New York Weekly Graphic in January 1874. The verso contains a fragment of correspondence.



Whitman Archive Title: Lincoln
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01760
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 37
Folder: ca. 1878–1890, "Abraham Lincoln"
Date: 1870–1874
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Content: Notes on Abraham Lincoln and the political climate leading up to the "attempted secession," including handwritten corrections of printed prose. This manuscript contributed to "Origins of Attempted Secession. Not the whole matter, but some facts worth conning to-day and any day," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). "Origins of Attempted Secession" was first published as part of "'Tis But Ten Years Since [First Paper]," New York Weekly Graphic (24 January 1874). Portions of this essay were revised and used in Memoranda During the War (1875–1876) before appearing in Specimen Days & Collect. Whitman included "Origins of Attempted Secession" in Complete Prose Works (1892).


'Tis But Ten Years Since [Third Paper]

Whitman Archive Title: [more quarters--having been lost in MS]
Whitman Archive ID: rut.00009
Repository: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey: Special Collections and University Archives
Repository ID: Ac.546
Date: 1874
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The recto of this item contains a draft of portion of "'Tis But Ten Years Since (Third Paper)," one of six pieces about the Civil War that Whitman published in the New York Weekly Graphic in January and February, 1874. In 1875, these pieces were gathered and republished as Memoranda During the War. The portion of the article that Whitman was drafting here is a short note that appeared at the end of the third installment, informing readers that even though these articles were written as a series, "each paper is, for the casual reader's purposes, complete in itself." This text was not found in any of the other articles and was not included in Memoranda During the War. The third installment appeared on 14 February 1874. The manuscript on the verso did not contribute to any known published piece.



Whitman Archive Title: [other than merely literary points]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00117
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 8
Date: 1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A heavily revised draft fragment, composed of several scraps of paper pasted together to form two leaves. The notes found on the first leaf were used in "Preface, 1876, to the two-volume Centennial Edition of L. of G. and 'Two Rivulets'" (1876). The prose fragment on the second leaf contributed to "Darwinism—(then Furthermore)," a short prose piece that orginally appeared in Two Rivulets (1876), but that was later incorporated into the "Notes Left Over" section of Collect in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83). Both of these pieces were eventually included in Complete Prose Works (1892). Cancelled Civil War "reminiscences" on the Battle of First Fredericksburgh and the sinking of the U.S.S. Hatteras appear on the verso of the second leaf. Whitman wrote about both of these events in "'Tis But Ten Years Since (Third Paper)," New York Weekly Graphic (14 February 1874).


To a Certain Cantatrice

Whitman Archive Title: Poem for the good old cause
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00002
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 56
Date: Between 1850 and 1871
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript includes ideas for two poems, one of which is titled "Poem for the good old cause." It is possible that this is a very early draft of the poem "To Thee Old Cause," which first appeared in the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass. However, Whitman used the term "good old cause" as early as the 1855 edition, where it appears in the Preface. In the 1860–1861 edition the phrase also appears in the poem "To a Cantatrice" (eventually titled "To a Certain Cantatrice." It originated in England during the seventeenth century, shortly after the English Civil War, and was frequently used by Whitman (see Clarence Gohdes, "Whitman and the 'Good Old Cause,'" American Literature 34.3 [November 1962]: 400–403). Edward Grier notes that this manuscript likely was written prior to 1860 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1329). The titles of both of the proposed poems ("Poem of...") suggest the title format of the 1856 edition. It is unclear whether the second proposed poem, titled Poem of the People, ever led to a published work.



Whitman Archive Title: To a Cantatrice
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00215
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 9 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This poem was first titled "To an artist," then "To an architect"; the smudged-out words "Lecture[s] / To" appear in light ink in the upper-left corner. These lines were revised and published under the title "To a Cantatrice" in the "Messenger Leaves" cluster of 1860. After being ungrouped and permanently retitled "To A Certain Cantatrice" in 1867, it was revised for inclusion in the cluster "Songs of Insurrection" in the 1872 and 1876 Leaves of Grass. In 1881 it was finally transferred to the cluster "Inscriptions". On one section of the same leaf of white ruled laid paper used for "To a Historian," and with another fragment of the same pencil draft of the speech or essay "Slavery—the Slaveholders—/ —The Constitution—the/ true America and Ameri-/ cans, the laboring persons.—" on verso.


To a Common Prostitute

Whitman Archive Title: [(illeg.) Dick Hunt]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00028
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: 1857 Trial Lines and Descriptions
Date: 1856-1857
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 90 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
Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 246–280, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "To a Common Prostitute," "You Felons on Trial in Courts," "Starting from Paumanok," "Trickle Drops," "I Was Looking for a Long While," "Poem of Joys," "Facing West from California's Shores," "To the States," "A Song of the Rolling Earth," "On the Beach a Night Alone," "Full of Life Now," and "With Antecedents."



Whitman Archive Title: To a Common Prostitute
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00065
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: To a common prostitute
Repository ID: HM 11205
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of "To a Common Prostitute," a poem published first in the 1860–61 edition of Leaves of Grass and retained in all subsequent editions. On the verso is a draft of an unpublished poem entitled "To the Future."


To a Foil'd European Revolutionaire

Whitman Archive Title: are you and me
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00221
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 57
Date: 1855 or 1856
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Most of the lines in this manuscript amount to a poetic rendering of sentences and phrases drawn from the prose preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and constitute a partial draft of the 1856 poem "Poem of Many In One," which eventually became "By Blue Ontario's Shore." The line at the bottom of this manuscript, partially cut away, was also drawn from the 1855 preface but was used in the 1856 poem "Liberty Poem for Asia, Africa, Europe, America, Australia, Cuba, and the Archipelagoes of The Sea," which Whitman titled, in its final version, "To a Foil'd European Revolutionaire." Draft lines on the back of this manuscript (upa.00005) also relate to the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: [Was it thought that all was]
Whitman Archive ID: bos.00005
Repository: Boston University: The Alice and Rollo G. Silver Collection
Box: 1
Repository Title: Notes for Lecture
Date: 1860-1869
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript appears to contain notes for a lecture, though it is uncertain whether Whitman ever used them for a lecture or a published prose work. Some of the phrasing in the last clause, regarding exiles, is echoed in the 1856 poem "Liberty Poem for Asia, Africa, Europe, America, Australia, Cuba, and The Archipelagoes of the Sea," which eventually became "To a Foil'd European Revolutionaire." "Notes for Lecture" is written at the bottom of the page in an unknown hand.


To a Historian

Whitman Archive Title: To a Historian
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00191
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20 x 16 cm pasted to 11 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: After undergoing extensive revisions, in 1860 "To a Historian" became section 10 of "Chants Democratic." In 1867 Whitman deleted five verses, transferred the poem to the supplement "Songs Before Parting," and permanently retitled it "To a Historian." It appeared as the fifth poem in the opening cluster "Inscriptions" in the 1872 and all later editions. On the verso appear fragments of pencil notes for a speech or essay Whitman wrote (most likely) in 1856, and revised in 1858, under the working title "Slavery—the Slaveholders—/ —The Constitution—the true America and Americans, the laboring persons—." The verso of another manuscript in this collection entitled "To a Cantatrice.—" contains an additional fragment of these notes.


To a Locomotive in Winter

Whitman Archive Title: To a Locomotive in Winter
Whitman Archive ID: bpl.00006
Repository: Boston Public Library: The Walt Whitman Collection
Repository Title: Ten pieces of manuscript
Repository ID: Whitman Mss.1
Date: about 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This is a two-page draft of "To a Locomotive in Winter," first published in the 19 February 1876 issue of the New York Daily Tribune. It appears that originally the two leaves were pasted together as one piece, but have since come apart. On the verso of page two is a draft of an unpublished poem entitled "The Soul and the Poet," which may be a draft of the poem "Come, said my Soul," the epigraph for the 1876, 1881–1882, and 1891–1892 editions of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: To a Locomotive in Winter
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04614
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To a Locomotive in Winter (1876). A.MS. draft.
Date: 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 7 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
Content: Draft lines and notes for the poem, "To a Locomotive in Winter," first published in the 19 February 1876 issue of the New York Daily Tribune, under the heading "Extracts from Two Rivulets." "To a Locomotive in Winter" was reprinted in the "Two Rivulets" section of Two Rivulets (1876 before being included in Leaves of Grass in 1881.


To a President

Whitman Archive Title: One good of knowing
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00124
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Repository Title: One good of knowing the great politics of nature
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A prose note on "the great politics of nature" that Whitman reworked and used in the poem "To a President," first published in Leaves of Grass (1860–1861), and reprinted in subsequent editions of Leaves.


To a Pupil

Whitman Archive Title: To a Pupil
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00213
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The manuscript bears the title "To a Pupil"; however, the original title seems to have been cut away. This poem was revised somewhat and published under the same title in the "Messenger Leaves" cluster of the 1860 Leaves of Grass. It was ungrouped in 1867, transferred to a "Leaves of Grass" group within the "Passage to India" supplement in 1872 (also 1876), and finally moved to the cluster "Autumn Rivulets" within Leaves of Grass in 1881.


To a Stranger

Whitman Archive Title: To A Stranger
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00334
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two leaves of pink paper, both 21 x 13 cm, in black ink, with revisions in the same ink and in light ink. Pinholes mostly in center and in left margin of each page. This poem was first numbered 94, and the first word was "Stranger"; Whitman penciled in a question mark, in parentheses, next to the title. It was numbered section 22 of "Calamus" in 1860: the lines on the first page correspond to verses 1-6 of the 1860 version, and those on the second ("You give me the pleasure") to verses 7-10. Whitman reintroduced the title "To a Stranger" in the 1867 Leaves.


To a Western Boy

Whitman Archive Title: [To the young man]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00337
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 9 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of white wove paper (15 x 9 cm), in black ink, with revisions in the same ink and in pencil. Whitman also penciled in the page number 16 in the lower-left corner. Pinholes in center and at top. This page bears the same papermaker's mark as 1:3:35. Twelfth in the original sequence "Live Oak, with Moss" (with ornamental Roman numeral), it became section 42 of "Calamus" in 1860. In 1867 Whitman changed the poem to an apostrophe, adding the first line "O Boy of the West!" (later removed) and permanently retitling it "To a Western Boy."


To an Exclusive

Whitman Archive Title: To an Exclusive
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00139
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 11
Date:
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 20.5 cm x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript contains lines of an unpublished poem comparing the power of the voice of the poet and the common man to the "Exclusive." Whitman challenges future generations to follow his lead in representing those who remain unheard and to "respond to whatever needs response" at that time. The verso of the second leaf is an ordered list of poems beginning with "33 A Handful of Air" and ending with "72 Leaf."


To be Present Only

Whitman Archive Title: At the Complimentary Dinner, Camden
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00338
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 129
Date: 1889
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A corrected proof of "To Be Present Only," Whitman's response to an invitation to give an address at the complimentary dinner held in honor of his 70th birthday in Camden on 31 May 1889. Horace Traubel published Whitman's response as "At the Complimentary Dinner, Camden, New Jersey, May 31, 1889 " in Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman, May 31, 1889: Notes, Addresses, Letters, Telegrams (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1889). Whitman later collected this response in Complete Prose (1892), under the title "To Be Present Only."



Whitman Archive Title: At the Complimentary Dinner, Camden
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00454
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 129
Date: 1889
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A corrected proof of "To Be Present Only," Whitman's response to an invitation to give an address at the complimentary dinner held in honor of his 70th birthday in Camden on 31 May 1889. Horace Traubel published Whitman's response as "At the Complimentary Dinner, Camden, New Jersey, May 31, 1889" in Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman, May 31, 1889: Notes, Addresses, Letters, Telegrams (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1889). Whitman later collected this response in Complete Prose (1892), under the title "To Be Present Only."



Whitman Archive Title: At the Complimentary Dinner, Camden
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00455
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 129
Date: 1889
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A corrected proof of "To Be Present Only," Whitman's response to an invitation to give an address at the complimentary dinner held in honor of his 70th birthday in Camden on 31 May 1889. Horace Traubel published Whitman's response as "At the Complimentary Dinner, Camden, New Jersey, May 31, 1889" in Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman, May 31, 1889: Notes, Addresses, Letters, Telegrams (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1889). Whitman later collected this response in Complete Prose (1892), under the title "To Be Present Only."


to enjoy the Panorama

Whitman Archive Title: Army Hospitals and Cases
Whitman Archive ID: amh.00010
Repository: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Date: 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The first page of a fair copy draft of "Army Hospitals and Cases," an essay first published in the October 1888 issue of The Century magazine.


To Foreign Lands

Whitman Archive Title: To Other Lands
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00009
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: To other lands
Repository ID: HM 11204
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft, with some corrections, of the poem eventually titled "To Foreign Lands," first published in Leaves of Grass (1860–61) as "To other Lands" as part of the "Messenger Leaves" cluster. In the 1871–72 edition it received its final title and position within the "Inscriptions" cluster.


To Get the Final Lilt of Songs

Whitman Archive Title: Old Age's Lambent Peaks
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00233
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age's Lambent Peaks (1888). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 33 x 15 cm; envelope 10.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An edited proof sheet with three poems: "Old Age's Lambent Peaks," "A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine," "To Get the Final Lilt of Songs," all published first in 1888. In addition to corrections, Whitman has written a note to the printer at the top of the page. Also included is an envelope with "printer's proofs, short poems, Walt Whitman, 1888, (autographic)" written on it.



Whitman Archive Title: To Get the Final Lilt of Songs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00311
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To Get the Final Lilt of Songs (1888). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof sheet of "To Get the Final Lilt of Songs," which was first published in 1888. A note in Whitman's hand, "publ'd in Herald April 16 '88," is at the bottom of the page. On the verso is Whitman's prose note serving to coordinate the sharing of proof slips and correspondence within his circle of acquaintance.



Whitman Archive Title: To get the final lilt of songs
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00086
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: bv8
Folder:
Repository Title: Sands at Seventy: To Get the Final Lilt of Songs
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript, heavily revised, of "To Get the Final Lilt of Songs," which was first published in the April 16, 1888 issue of the New York Herald under the title "The Final Lilt of Songs." It was later included, under its final title, in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to the so-called deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (1891–92).


To Him That was Crucified

Whitman Archive Title: To Him that was Crucified
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00013
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: To him that was crucified
Repository ID: HM 11208
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Draft, with many corrections, of "To Him That Was Crucified," a poem first published in Leaves of Grass (1860–61).


To One Shortly to Die

Whitman Archive Title: I must not deceive you
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00560
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 4 x 14.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1860. The lines were used in the poem "To One Shortly to Die," first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Draft lines on the back of this leaf (uva.00280) appeared with revisions in the first poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: Remember if you are dying
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00278
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1860. The lines are similar in subject to lines in the poem "To One Shortly To Die," first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. The use of ellipses within poetic lines was characteristic of Whitman's first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, however, and lines in this manuscript also resemble lines that appeared in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." On the upper right corner of the manuscript appear the words "note last page of 'Ghost-seers'" in Whitman's hand, which may be a reference to one of the two volumes of The Night Side of Nature, Or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers, by Catherine Crowe (London: T. C. Newby, 1848; G. Routledge & Co., 1852). Whitman mentioned the book in a conversation with Horace Traubel on December 9, 1889 (With Walt Whitman in Camden, 6:180–2). The phrase "Ghost-seers" also recalls a statement regarding Emerson in "Leaves-Droppings," a section of correspondence and commentary Whitman appended to the 1856 edition: "[Emerson] sees the future of truths as our Spirit-seers discern the future of man..." Fragmentary lines written on the back of this manuscript leaf (uva.00561) were used in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."



Whitman Archive Title: [George Walker]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00143
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 37
Folder: 1855-1856, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry trial lines
Date: between 1855-1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 45 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
Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:226–243, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Starting from Paumanok," "A Song for Occupations," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Salut au Monde!," "To One Shortly to Die," and "A Woman Waits for Me."



Whitman Archive Title: To One Shortly To Die
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00211
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Originally numbered 95 and then changed to 96. This poem was published under the title "To One Shortly to Die," with only minor revisions, in the 1860 "Messenger Leaves" cluster. In 1871, Whitman made small but significant additions to the poem and transferred it to the supplement "Passage to India." In 1881 it was finally moved to the cluster "Whispers of Heavenly Death."



Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


To Rich Givers

Whitman Archive Title: To Rich Givers
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00212
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: "To Rich Givers—" was originally numbered 98. In 1860 it formed part of the "Messenger Leaves" cluster under the same title. After being ungrouped (1867) and transferred to the cluster "Songs of Parting" (1872 and 1876), it finally appeared, in 1881, in the cluster "By the Roadside." The deleted verses on the back of the leaf represent an earlier version of the manuscript poem "To the Future," never published by Whitman, and currently housed in the Huntington Library.


To the Garden the World

Whitman Archive Title: Leaves-Droppings
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00180
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 16 x 10 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: After being incorporated as the first main section of "Enfans d'Adam" in 1860, this poem received its own title, "To the Garden, the World" in the 1867 Leaves of Grass and retained its position in the "Children of Adam" group.



Whitman Archive Title: In the garden
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00583
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: late 1850s
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8.5 x 10 cm pasted to 20 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A composite leaf consisting of two pieces of white wove paper that have been pasted together. On the larger piece is an extensively revised pencil draft of the first poem in "Enfans d'Adam." The group first appeared in print in the 1860 Leaves of Grass with this poem as section 1. The poem was permanently titled "To the Garden of the World" in 1867. On the reverse of the leaf (uva.00023) are verses that became section 18 of "Calamus" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass; the poem was permanently titled "City of Orgies" in 1867.


To the Man-of-War-Bird

Whitman Archive Title: A terrible day & night
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00097
Repository: Library of Congress: George S. Hellman Collection
Date: 1869–1876
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Comprised of a clipping featuring text reprinted from the chapter "Triumph of the Wing. The Frigate Bird" in Jules Michelet's The Bird and a printed copy of Whitman's "To the Man-of-War-Bird," both of which have been pasted to the back of a letter fragment that Whitman received from T. W. H. Rolleston. This manuscript includes prose notes in Whitman's hand. These notes describe the basic narrative structure of "The Man-of-War-Bird," a poem published in the London Anthenæum (1 April 1876). Reprinted as "Thou Who Hast Slept All Night Upon the Storm" in the Philadelphia Progress (16 November 1878) and as "To the Man-of-War-Bird" in Leaves of Grass (1881–1882 and 1891–1892). As Whitman acknowledged when it appeared in the Progress, the poem owes much to Michelet's work, particularly to the English translation of The Bird, first published in 1868.



Whitman Archive Title: The man-of-war.-Bird
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00005
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: between 1869 and 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is a note by Whitman for the poem "To the Man-of-War Bird," which was first published in the April 1, 1876 issue of Athenaeum.



Whitman Archive Title: Thou Who Hast Slept All Night Upon the Storm
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00314
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To the Man-of-War-Bird (1876). Printed Copies.
Date: between 1876-1878
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Printed copy of "Thou Who Hast Slept All Night Upon the Storm" with bibliographic notations and corrections in Whitman's hand. This clipping is from the Philadelphia Progress (November 16, 1878). The poem had been published earlier as "The Man-of-War Bird" in the 1 April 18 issue of The Athenæum. It was eventually titled "To the Man-of-War-Bird."



Whitman Archive Title: [Bursts the wild storm]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00313
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To the Man-of-War-Bird (1876). Printed Copies.
Date: about 1876
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A heavily edited draft of the poem initially published as "The Man-of-War Bird" and eventually titled "To the Man-of-War-Bird." The draft is accompanied by Whitman's note about the poem's first publication in the April 1876 issue of The Athenæum. The note itself is dated March 1876.



Whitman Archive Title: Thou Who Hast Slept All Night Upon the Storm
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02938
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To the Man-of-War-Bird (1876). Printed Copies.
Date: between 1876 and 1878
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "Thou Who Hast Slept All Night Upon the Storm," with corrections in Whitman's hand. The poem was first published as "The Man-of-War Bird" in the 1 April 18 issue of The Athenæum and finally titled "To the Man-of-War-Bird."



Whitman Archive Title: Thou Who Hast Slept All Night Upon the Storm
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02939
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To the Man-of-War-Bird (1876). Printed Copies.
Date: between 1876 and 1878
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "Thou Who Hast Slept All Night Upon the Storm," with bibliographic notations and corrections in Whitman's hand. The poem was first published as "The Man-of-War Bird" in the 1 April 18 issue of The Athenæum and finally titled "To the Man-of-War-Bird."



Whitman Archive Title: Thou Who Hast Slept All Night Upon the Storm
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02940
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To the Man-of-War-Bird (1876). Printed Copies.
Date: between 1876-1878
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Printed copy of "The Man-of-War Bird" (later published as "To the To the Man-of-War-Bird") with a bibliographic notation in Whitman's hand. This page is from the London Athenæum (April 1, 1876).



Whitman Archive Title: To the Man-of-War-Bird
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00049
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: To the Man-of-War-Bird
Date: about 1878
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, proof with corrections
View images: 1
Content: Clipping of "The Man-of-War-Bird," with handwritten revisions, from the November 16, 1878 Philadelphia Progress. The poem had first appeared in the London Athenaeum, on 1 April 1876. The poem was included in some copies of Leaves of Grass (1876). In the 1881–82 and later printings of Leaves of Grass it was included in the "Sea-Drift" cluster. The newspaper clipping has been pasted down and no verso image is available.


To the Pending Year

Whitman Archive Title: To the Year 1889
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00077
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To the Year 1889 (1889). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 19 x 21.25 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An early draft of "To the Year 1889," first published in January 5, 1889. The poem was later published under the title "To the Pending Year."



Whitman Archive Title: Down, down, proud gorge
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00192
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Down, Down, Proud Gorge. A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28 x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of a poem titled "Down, down, proud gorge." At the bottom of the same leaf is another draft of a poem entitled "Are they last words?" These drafts were later greatly revised and combined when published in 1889 with the title "To the Year 1889," later re-titled "To the Pending Year."



Whitman Archive Title: To the Year 1889
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00316
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To the Year 1889 (1889). Proof Sheet
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof sheet of "To the Year 1889" (first published in 1889 and later under the title "To the Pending Year") with a bibliographic notation in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: To the Year 1889
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04597
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: To the year 1889
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00007
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: late 1888 or very early in 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a late draft of "To the Year 1889," published first on January 5, 1889, in the Critic. Retitled "To the Pending Year," the poem appeared in Good-Bye My Fancy in 1891.



Whitman Archive Title: Have I no word for thee
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00083
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12.5 by 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: About seven lines, with revisions, toward the poem "To the Year 1889." The writing on the verso (not in Whitman's hand) makes reference to the title of this poem, as well as to Good-Bye My Fancy and a "Putnam 1902 Edition." "To the Year 1889" was first published on January 5, 1889, in the Critic. The poem was retitled "To the Pending Year" for its inclusion in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891)



Whitman Archive Title: To the Year 1889
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00050
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 2
Repository Title: To the Year 1889
Date: 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, proof
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Page proof with handwritten information on the poem's initial publication in the Critic on 5 January 1889. Retitled "To the Pending Year," it was included in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) and, as part of the "Good-Bye my Fancy" annex, in the so-called deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (1891–92).


To the Reader, at Parting

Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 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
Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


To the Spring and Brook

Whitman Archive Title: [Brook Babbling]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00029
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 45
Repository Title: Brook Babbling
Date: 1876–1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Prose notes titled "Brook Babbling" with another possible title, "?Sounds," written in the upper-left-hand corner of the page. Portions of this manuscript appeared slightly revised in "To the Spring and Brook," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) before being collected in Complete Prose Works (1892).


To The States

Whitman Archive Title: [(illeg.) Dick Hunt]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00028
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: 1857 Trial Lines and Descriptions
Date: 1856-1857
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 90 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
Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 246–280, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "To a Common Prostitute," "You Felons on Trial in Courts," "Starting from Paumanok," "Trickle Drops," "I Was Looking for a Long While," "Poem of Joys," "Facing West from California's Shores," "To the States," "A Song of the Rolling Earth," "On the Beach a Night Alone," "Full of Life Now," and "With Antecedents."



Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman's Caution
Whitman Archive ID: amh.00009
Repository: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Date: between 1856 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a draft of "Walt Whitman's Caution", a poem first appearing as one of the "Messenger Leaves" in Leaves of Grass (1860). The title of the poem was changed to "To the States" in the 1881–1882 edition of Leaves.


To the States, To Identify the 16th, 17th or 18th Presidentiad

Whitman Archive Title: A Past Presidentiad, and one to come also
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00214
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman wrote and deleted the date 1858 in blue pencil in the upper right corner of the first leaf, and inscribed the same date in normal pencil in the lower left corner of the second leaf. This poem became "To The States, To Identify the 16th, 17th, or 18th Presidentiad" in the cluster "Messenger Leaves" in the 1860 Leaves of Grass. Ungrouped in 1867, it was transferred in 1872 to a "Leaves of Grass" group within the main body. In 1881 it was finally transferred to the cluster "By the Roadside". Images of the versos are unavailable.


To the Sunset Breeze

Whitman Archive Title: To the Sunset Breeze
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00315
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To the Sunset Breeze (1890). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "To a Sunset Breeze" with notations in Whitman's hand. The poem was first published in 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: To the Sunset Breeze
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02444
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To the Sunset Breeze (1890). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "To a Sunset Breeze" with notations in Whitman's hand. The poem was first published in 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: To the Sunset Breeze
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02445
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To the Sunset Breeze (1890). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "To a Sunset Breeze" with notations and corrections in Whitman's hand. The poem was first published in 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: To the Sunset Breeze
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02446
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: To the Sunset Breeze (1890). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proofs of "To a Sunset Breeze" with notations in Whitman's hand. The poem was first published in 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: ?To the ?sunset Breeze
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00051
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: To the Sunset Breeze, Manuscript early draft
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A heavily revised early draft of "To the Sun-set Breeze," a poem first published in Lippincott's Magazine as "To the Sunset Breeze," in December 1890. It later appeared in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) and, as part of the "Good-Bye my Fancy" annex, in the so-called deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (1891–92).



Whitman Archive Title: To the sunset breeze
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00053
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: To the Sunset Breeze, Manuscript intermediate draft
Date: 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily revised intermediate draft, approximately sixteen lines, of "To the Sun-set Breeze," which was published in Lippincott's Magazine as "To the Sunset Breeze" in December 1890, in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) and, as part of the "Good-Bye my Fancy" annex, in the so-called deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (1891–92).



Whitman Archive Title: To the Sun-Set Breeze
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00052
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: To the Sunset Breeze, Manuscript late draft
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Printer's copy, sixteen lines, with minor revisions. "To the Sun-set Breeze" was first published in Lippincott's Magazine as "To the Sunset Breeze" in December 1890. It later appeared in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) and, as part of the "Good-Bye my Fancy" annex, in the so-called deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (1891–92).


To Think of Time

Whitman Archive Title: No doubt the efflux of the soul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00025
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Undated Thoughts, Ideas, and Trial lines (3 V.)
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: This notebook consists almost entirely of prose. However, the ideas and language developed throughout the notebook can be linked to a number of poems that appeared in Leaves of Grass, including "Song of Myself," "Great are the Myths" (ultimately shortened to a few lines and titled "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night"), "Faces," "The Sleepers," and "To Think of Time," versions of which appeared in Leaves of Grass in 1855. One manuscript passage is similar to a passage in the preface to the 1855 edition. Thus, this notebook was almost certainly written before that date. Content from the first several paragraphs of this notebook was also used slightly revised in "Song of the Open Road," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves as "Poem of the Road."



Whitman Archive Title: And to me each minute
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00057
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Repository Title: Song of Myself
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript includes lines that relate to the prose preface and to several of the poems in that edition, including the poems eventually titled "Song of Myself," "To Think of Time," and "A Song for Occupations." The manuscript also includes lines that relate to the manuscript poem "Pictures,"" which probably dates to the mid- to late 1850s. Notes about the arrangement and production of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass are written on the back of this manuscript.



Whitman Archive Title: Talbot Wilson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00141
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Are the prostitutes nothing
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00889
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 11
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript includes a line beginning "Are the prostitutes nothing?" which is a draft of a line from the third poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "To Think of Time." The words "attraction of gravity," included in a crossed-out line in this manuscript, appear in two contexts in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The closest in meaning to its use in this manuscript is in the poem later titled "Great Are the Myths": "It cannot be varied by statutes, any more than love, pride, the attraction of gravity, can" (1855, p. 251). "Great Are the Myths" was ultimately shortened to a few lines and published as "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night" in the 1881 Leaves of Grass. On the reverse (duk.00032) is also an early version of a part of "Great Are the Myths."



Whitman Archive Title: And I say the stars
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00042
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Song of Myself (1855). A.MS. draft.
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines are similar to lines in the first and third poems in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself" and "To Think of Time." Similar draft lines also appear in "Talbot Wilson," an early notebook (loc.00141). On the verso (loc.07869) is a draft of a piece of journalism published on October 20, 1854.



Whitman Archive Title: The three or four poets
Whitman Archive ID: tul.00002
Repository: University of Tulsa: Walt Whitman Ephemera
Box: 1
Folder: 2
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s, as he was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript features draft lines of the third poem in that edition, eventually titled "To Think of Time." On the back of this leaf (tul.00011) are notes toward a poem about "a perfect school."



Whitman Archive Title: As the turbulence of the
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00025
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: The echo of the phrase "vegetables and minerals" in the third poem of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) suggests the possibility that Whitman drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s, as he was composing the poems that were published there. It is also possible, however, that the manuscript is unrelated to the first edition and was written during a slightly later period.



Whitman Archive Title: Understand that you can have
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00138
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Repository Title: ["Understand that you can have in your writing..."]
Date: 1855 or 1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Although no specific lines from this manuscript can be directly tied to any of Whitman's published work, the language and ideas are similar to certain sections of the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, as well as to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself," suggesting that this manuscript may have been written around that time. Wording in this manuscript is also similar to a line in the 1855 poem eventually titled "To Think of Time." A note written by Richard Maurice Bucke, one of Whitman's literary executors, dates the manuscript to 1855 or 1856 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:222).


To Those Who've Fail'd

Whitman Archive Title: [? A laurel wreath]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00053
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Box: Oversized (+).
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily revised draft of the poem "To Those Who've Fail'd." The poem was published in the New York Herald on 27 January 1888 and later reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888).


to you [to you an]

Whitman Archive Title: to you an inheritance
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00890
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript fragment contains about two and a half lines of poetry, heavily corrected, whose relationship to Whitman's published writing is unknown. On the reverse side (duk.00277) is a manuscript that contains a list of trial titles, probably for the poem first published as "Calamus 15" in Leaves of Grass (1860) and eventually titled "Trickle Drops." This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "And there, farther south," "The Scout," and "In a poem make the thought."


To-day and Thee

Whitman Archive Title: [To-day]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00169
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 71
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript draft of a poem first appearing in print in the New York Herald, April 23, 1888 entitled "To-day and Thee". A note in the top margin: "sent April 21 to Herald" indicates that the draft was likely completed around the time of publication.


[To-day at the peak]

Whitman Archive Title: [To-Day at the peak]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00360
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Tramp and Strike Questions, The

Whitman Archive Title: The tramp & strike questions
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00311
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: The Tramp and Strike Questions, notes
Date: about 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This page of notes about the problems of American capitalism is one of several manuscripts that Whitman wrote with the intention of delivering a lecture on what he called "the tramp and strike questions." Though the lecture never materialized, a short essay based on the manuscripts was published under the title "The Tramp and Strike Questions. Part of a Lecture proposed, (never deliver'd.) " in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83). It was later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Tramp & strike question
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00312
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: The Tramp and Strike Questions, notes
Date: about 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: These notes, jotted with apparent haste, are part of the manuscript material Whitman generated with the intention of delivering a lecture on what he called "the tramp and strike questions." Though the lecture never materialized, a short essay based on the material was published under the title "The Tramp and Strike Questions. Part of a Lecture proposed, (never deliver'd.) " in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83). It was later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: for tramp & strike
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00779
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: II-7B 190
Date: 1879-1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A manuscript scrap related to Whitman's undelivered lecture "The Tramp and Strike Question," which was written in 1879 but not published until it was included in Specimen Days in 1882. Although this scrap contains thoughts and ideas similar to those found in the essay, these lines do not appear to have made it into the final version of the piece. An image of the verso is unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Tramps & Strikes
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05251
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: for Tramp and strike question
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05252
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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 the Strike & Tramp questions
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05258
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


Trapper's Bride, The

Whitman Archive Title: [The Trapper's Bride]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00164
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, 1856, Indian Theme for Poem
Date: 1856 or later
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A clipping of an article entitled "The Indian in American Art" from The Crayon: A Journal Devoted to the Graphic Arts, and the Literature Related to Them, with a piece of paper pasted to the bottom containing an idea for a poem about Native Americans. At the top is written "The Trapper's Bride by a Baltimore artist." A date on the verso indicates that the document is from January 1856.


Trickle Drops

Whitman Archive Title: [(illeg.) Dick Hunt]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00028
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: 1857 Trial Lines and Descriptions
Date: 1856-1857
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 90 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
Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 246–280, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "To a Common Prostitute," "You Felons on Trial in Courts," "Starting from Paumanok," "Trickle Drops," "I Was Looking for a Long While," "Poem of Joys," "Facing West from California's Shores," "To the States," "A Song of the Rolling Earth," "On the Beach a Night Alone," "Full of Life Now," and "With Antecedents."



Whitman Archive Title: Drops of my Blood
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00277
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 29
Date: about 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript that contains a list of trial titles, probably for the poem first published as "Calamus 15" in Leaves of Grass (1860) and eventually titled "Trickle Drops." On the reverse (duk.00890) is a fragment of about two and a half lines of poetry, heavily corrected, whose relationship to Whitman's published writing is unknown. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "And there," "'The Scout'," and "In a poem make the."



Whitman Archive Title: Confession-Drops
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00311
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21.5 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written on a light blue Williamsburgh tax blank, this poem became section 15 of "Calamus" in 1860, and, with the addition of a new first line, was retitled "Trickle, Drops" in 1867.


True Conquerors

Whitman Archive Title: True Conquerors
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00006
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 9
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a manuscript draft of the poem, "True Conquerors," which was first published in the New York Herald on February 15, 1888. Revised and reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888).


Truly, what is commonest

Whitman Archive Title: truly what is commonest
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05641
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Twenty Years

Whitman Archive Title: After Twenty Years
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00176
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: After Twenty Years (1888). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 18.5 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in ink at the top of a proof of "After Twenty Years," are six words: "From the English Magazine of Art." This poem was published under the title "Twenty Years" in 1888.


Twilight

Whitman Archive Title: Twilight
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00317
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Twilight (1889). Proof on birch bark.
Date: June, 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 11.5 x 17 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Written in ink, with one line in pencil, are notes on a proof of "Twilight," which is printed on a piece of tan birch bark. The notes, in Whitman's hand, read: "Walt Whitman, June 1889" "on birch bark," and "a curio, on birch bark, Walt Whitman." "Twilight" was first published in 1887.


Twilight Song, A

Whitman Archive Title: As I Sit in Twilight, Late, or twilight song
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00147
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 4
Date: around 1865 or 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 30 cm x 22 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript draft of the poem "As I Sit in Twilight" which Whitman eventually retitled "A Twilight Song" and published in Century, May 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: [As I sit in twilight alone by the flicker]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00002
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 4
Date: around 1865 or 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 26 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript draft of the poem "As I Sit in Twilight" which Whitman eventually retitled "A Twilight Song" and published in Century, May 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: As I sit in twilight
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00003
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 4
Date: around 1865 or 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 27 cm x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript draft of the poem "As I Sit in Twilight" which Whitman eventually retitled "A Twilight Song" and published in Century, May 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: Unknown
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00004
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 4
Date: around 1865 or 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28.5 cm x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript draft of a poem Whitman titled "Unknown" and which eventually became "A Twilight Song" which was published in Century, May 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: Unknown
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00005
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 4
Date: around 1865 or 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 27.5 cm x 21 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript draft of a poem Whitman titled "Unknown" and which eventually became "A Twilight Song" which was published in Century, May 1890.



Whitman Archive Title: [From wooded Maine]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00268
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 11 x 18 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The verso letter is dated "Aug 14th /89," and asks Whitman to send the unidentified writer a copy of the "latest special edition" of Leaves of Grass. These trial verses became part of "A Twilight Song"—subtitled, "for unknown buried soldiers, North and South"—which was first published in theMay, 1890 Century and then included in the second annex "Good-Bye My Fancy" in the 1892 "deathbed" edition of Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: A Twilight Song
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00020
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository ID: HM 1224
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Late draft, with a few corrections, of "A Twilight Song," a poem first published in the May 1890 issue of Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, where it was subtitled "For unknown buried soldiers, North and South." It was reprinted, without the subtitle, in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) and in the "Good-By my Fancy" annex of Leaves of Grass (1891–92).



Whitman Archive Title: The Buried Army
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00108
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: The Buried Army (After Sept. 1885). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 18 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial lines, possibly for "A Twilight Song,"first published in 1890 and subtitled "For unknown buried soldiers, North and South."



Whitman Archive Title: A Twilight Song
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00318
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: A Twilight Song (1890). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20.25 x 18.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "A Twilight Song," which was first published in 1890, with corrections in Whitman's hand and with notes from both Whitman and the printer.



Whitman Archive Title: A Twilight Song
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00351
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: A Twilight Song (1890). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20.25 x 18.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "A Twilight Song," which was first published in 1890, with notes in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: A Twilight Song
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00352
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: A Twilight Song (1890). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 20.25 x 18.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "A Twilight Song," which was first published in 1890, with a note in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: [A flash of love]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00197
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 27
Folder: A Flash of Love (1889). A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1889-1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12.5 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A two-line draft written on the back of an envelope from F. Gutekunst's Imperial Photograph Galleries, with a note by Whitman on front that reads "head and bust WW, taken 1889, fairly good." "[A flash of love]" would later appear in a revised form in "A Twilight Song," first published in 1890.


Twilight Whisperings

Whitman Archive Title: Twilight Whisperings
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01078
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 36
Folder: Undated, "Twilight Whisperings," draft
Date: 1870–1882
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains notes for a potential poem or prose piece, with two possible titles "Twilight Whisperings" and "Chants at Early Candle Light." The relationship of this note to Whitman's published work is unknown.


Two Brooklyn Boys

Whitman Archive Title: Two Brooklyn boys.
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00289
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of "Two Brooklyn Boys," a short piece published in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Two Brothers, one South, one North

Whitman Archive Title: [In an adjoining ward]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00246
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Brief manuscript fragment related to "Two Brothers, one South, one North—May 28–29" in Memoranda during the War (1875–1876), an essay later reprinted as Two Brothers, one South, one North in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and in Complete Prose Works (1892). The manuscript leaf is pasted to a backing sheet, making the reverse side inaccesssible.


[Two little buds]

Whitman Archive Title: [Two little buds]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00044
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: unknown
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A note consisting of four lines, possibly written toward a poem, that present the metaphor of "two little human buds" prematurely taken from the earth to bloom in "God's immortal garden." The relationship between this draft and Whitman's published poetry is unknown.


[Two Rivulets]

Whitman Archive Title: [Two Rivulets]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00150
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Diaries, Diary Notes, and Address Books
Box: 1
Folder: Address Books, 1876-86 (3 v.)
Date: 1876-1886
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: more than 17 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
Content: An address book filled with names and addresses, notes, figures, lists, and trial lines for poems and prose. Contained within the address book are trial lines, which Whitman labeled "Old Proverb," called "[I'd make the Songs of the Nation]" (see image 26). Also in this notebook is a note entitled "Death of Lincoln" describing ambitions for a piece on that topic (see image 5).


Two Rivulets, including Democratic Vistas, Centennial Songs, and Passage to India

Whitman Archive Title: Preface Two Rivulets
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00122
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 62
Date: about 1876
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Content: Fragment, heavily revised, of the preface to Two Rivulets (1876). Several of the leaves are made of scraps pasted together, and on the reverse of the fourth leaf is a draft fragment of the opening lines of a poem first published in the Galaxy (September 1867) as "A Carol of Harvest, for 1867," which was ultimately titled "The Return of the Heroes," Leaves of Grass (1881–1882).



Whitman Archive Title: [Drifts & Bubbles]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05073
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Century Thoughts]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05074
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Walt Whitman's Centennial]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05075
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


[Two scenes capriciously rising out of the past]

Whitman Archive Title: [Two scenes capriciously rising out of the past]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00039
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Children of Adam. A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1850-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 26.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Portions appear to be trial lines for a poem entitled "Pictures" published posthumously, first in 1925. Other lines have an unknown relationship to Whitman's published work.


Two Vaults, The

Whitman Archive Title: (Poem) Shadows
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00119
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: (Poem) ? Reflections Shadows
Date: Between 1850 and 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript may have been written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The description of the plate-glass windows on Broadway bears some resemblance to a description in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." This manuscript also bears a distant resemblance to a discussion of "shadows" in the poem later titled "There Was a Child Went Forth." It is also possible that the manuscript was written later, however: the description of Broadway in these lines also closely resembles a description Whitman wrote in his unfinished poem known as "The Two Vaults," a poem that is recorded in a New York notebook (loc.00348) that probably dates to the early 1860s. Whitman also wrote about Broadway elsewhere in later poems, so the manuscript may have been written still later. The manuscript has been pasted down, so an image of the back of the leaf is currently unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Notebook Walt Whitman
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00348
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Typical Soldiers

Whitman Archive Title: Brooklyn & Washington Notebook
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04604
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Hospital notebook
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05356
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


Unexpress'd, The

Whitman Archive Title: Old Age Echoes
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00228
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 28
Folder: Old Age Echoes (1891). Proof Sheet.
Date: about 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 28.5 x 16.5 cm, 6 x 14 cm attached, printed, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof sheet of "Old Age Echoes" with many corrections written in ink and pencil. "Old Age Echoes" is a general heading for four poems: "Sounds of the Winter," "The Unexpress'd," "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!," and "After the Argument."



Whitman Archive Title: The Unexpress'd
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00012
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1889 or 1890
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a draft of "The Unexpress'd," which was published in Lippincott's Magazine in March 1891. A note on the manuscript in Whitman's hand indicates that the poem was sent for publication in 1890 to W. H. Alden, the editor of Harper's Monthly Magazine, but was rejected.



Whitman Archive Title: The Unexpress'd
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00319
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: The Unexpress'd (1890). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 22 x 17 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A heavily corrected draft of the poem "The Unexpress'd," which was published first in 1891, written on the verso of a cancelled letter from Marjorie Cook, dated September 25, 1889.



Whitman Archive Title: Old Age Echoes
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00152
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 65
Date: 1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 52.5 cm x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The general title, "Old Age Echoes," appears at the top of the page. Beneath that title are two poems with individual titles: "Sounds of the Winter" and "The Unexpress'd." Pasted to the leaf below the second poem is a woodcut engraving of Whitman along with his autograph. The untitled lines directly following the picture and autograph eventually become the poem titled "After the Argument." The three poems were first published together in Lippincott's Magazine, March 1891, under the general title "Old Age Echoes."


Unfolded Out of the Folds

Whitman Archive Title: Rule in all addresses
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00163
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, Rule in All Addresses.
Date: Before 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Lines and phrases on both the recto and verso of this manuscript contributed to portions of the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself," and possibly to other sections of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, suggesting a composition date before 1855. However, this manuscript also includes lines that probably contributed to "Sun-Down Poem" (later retitled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry") in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. It is possible that some of these poetic lines contributed to the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. A line in this manuscript is similar to the following line, in the poem later titled "Song of Myself": "I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself" (1855, p. 17). Another line is similar to the lines "And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's-self is" (1855, p. 53) and "And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man" (1855, p. 26). Another manuscript line is similar to the line "Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man" (1855, p. 23). And several manuscript lines are similar to the lines beginning "Not merely of the New World but of Africa Europe or Asia . . . . a wandering savage, / A farmer, mechanic, or artist . . . . a gentleman, sailor, lover or quaker, / A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician or priest" (1855, p. 24). Three other lines are similar to: "Storming enjoying planning loving cautioning, / Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, / I tread day and night such roads" (1855, p. 38). Edward Grier speculates that Whitman's note "Don't forget the bombardment" relates to the "bombardment" of the "old artillerist" in "Song of Myself": "I am an old artillerist, and tell of some fort's bombardment . . . . and am there again" (1855, p. 40). (See Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:165). Several phrases of the prose on the verso were probably later used, in somewhat revised form, in the following lines from "Sun-down Poem" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass: "The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious, / My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Would not people laugh at me?" (1856, p. 216). The poem was later titled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." It is possible that some of the poetic lines on the verso contributed to the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines "I am too great to be a mere President or Major General / I remain with my fellows—with mechanics, and farmers and common people" may relate to the sentence from the preface that reads: "Other states indicate themselves in their deputies....but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors...but always most in the common people" (1855, p. iii). The line "I remain with them all on equal terms" may also be related to the following line in the preface: "The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms" (1855, p. vii). The line "In me are the old and young the fool and the wise thinker" may be related to a similar phrase in the poem eventually titled "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?": "The stupid and the wise thinker" (1855, p. 92). The phrase "mother of many children" appears in both the preface and in the poem later titled "Faces."


United States to Old World Critics, The

Whitman Archive Title: The United States to Old World Critics
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00007
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 10
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a manuscript draft of the poem, "The United States to Old World Critics," which was first published in the New York Herald on May 8, 1888. Reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888).


Unnamed Lands

Whitman Archive Title: The most immense part of
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00003
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 1
Date: Between 1855 and 1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: These manuscript leaves, one of which is held at the University of Texas, contain fragments of an unpublished prose piece that appears to represent an early draft of "Unnamed Lands," a poem published first in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. The material on the second leaf shares with that poem not only a close thematic similarity but also several of the same phrases. On the reverse of the manuscript leaves (see duk.00006, duk.00008, and tex.00002) are drafts of lines for the opening poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, ultimately titled "Song of Myself," sections six and seven. The poem was first titled, "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American," in the 1856 edition, and Whitman shortened the title to "Walt Whitman" in 1860–1861. The final title, "Song of Myself," was not introduced until the 1881–1882 edition of Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: [off, dim and filmy in their outlines]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00460
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 1
Date: between 1855 and 1860
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Prose fragment, showing moderate revision, of approximately 150 words. Phrases and ideas from this manuscript were incorporated in the poem "Unnamed Lands," first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript on the reverse, tex.00030, was probably written earlier, as it contributed to a poem first published in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and eventually titled "The Sleepers."



Whitman Archive Title: Unnamed Lands
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00222
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 5 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: Originally numbered 81 and revised by overwriting to 82, with the note "?/(Leaf of)" above the number and title. Whitman numbered the leaves 1-5 in pencil in the lower left corners. The leaves correspond to various numbered sections of the 1860 published version. In the 1872 Leaves of Grass Whitman transferred the poem to a "Leaves of Grass" group, and in 1881 it was finally moved, after several revisions through the different published versions, to the cluster "Autumn Rivulets."


Unnamed Remains the Bravest Soldier

Whitman Archive Title: [No poem sings]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00920
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 32
Folder: 1860, "War Memoranda," draft
Date: 1860–1876
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A heavily revised draft of "Unnamed Remains the Bravest Soldier." This piece first appeared untitled in Memoranda During the War (1876). It was reprinted in Specimen Days & Collect (1882).


Untold Want, The

Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 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
Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


unveil thy bosom, faithful tomb

Whitman Archive Title: Unveil Thy Bosom, Faithful Tomb
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00320
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Unveil Thy Bosom, Faithful Tomb (1865). A.MS. draft.
Date: April, 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 7.5 x 17 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of an unpublished burial lyric for the death of Lincoln entitled "Unveil thy bosom, faithful tomb" and dated April, 1865, written in pencil on a scrap of paper torn from a larger sheet.


Upon our Own Land

Whitman Archive Title: [Returned from my four months]
Whitman Archive ID: pri.00035
Repository: Princeton University Library: Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
Date: 1879–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A short note in which Whitman refers to his 1879 railroad trip to Kansas. Whitman travelled west to attend the quarter-centennial celebration of the Kansas settlement and to visit his brother Jeff in St. Louis. Whitman journeyed as far as Denver and the Rockies before returning to Camden on January 5, 1880. A portion of this manuscript was used in "Upon Our Own Land," a short piece Whitman included in Specimen Days & Collect (1882). "Upon Our Own Land" appeared unchanged in Complete Prose (1892).


Vast national tracts

Whitman Archive Title: Vast national tracts
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05354
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night

Whitman Archive Title: [September & October 1863]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00149
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Diaries, Diary Notes, and Address Books
Box: 1
Folder: Address Books 1863, Sept.–Oct.
Date: 1863
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 21 leaves, 10 x 7 cm, 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
Content: A notebook bound by Whitman and tied with red ribbon. It contains addresses of many soldiers hospitalized at Armory Square Hospital in Washington. Short case histories follow most of the names. Also contains trial lines for the poem "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night," first published in 1865 (see images 7, 11-14 and 16 for material related to "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night").


Visit at the Last to R. W. Emerson, A

Whitman Archive Title: How I Still Get Around and Take Notes (No. 5)
Whitman Archive ID: buf.00002
Repository: University at Buffalo
Date: 1881
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 complete draft, with corrections and notes to the printer, of "How I Still Get Around and Take Notes. (No. 5)," a piece of journalism that appeared in The Critic (Vol. I, no. 24) on December 3, 1881. Portions of the piece would later be reprinted as three separate sections of Specimen Days (1882–1883): "A Visit, at the Last, to R. W. Emerson," "Other Concord Notations," and "Boston Common—More of Emerson." The article was also reprinted, with small portions excised, in Alexander Ireland's 1882 volume In Memoriam. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Recollections of His Visits to England in 1833, 1847–8, 1872–3, and Extracts from Unpublished Letters (London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.), 113–115.



Whitman Archive Title: [The Dead Emerson]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00057
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 26
Repository Title: The Dead Emerson
Repository ID: #3829
Date: 1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript, entitled "The Dead Emerson," contains some handwritten notes about Whitman's last visit (which, according to the manuscript, took place in the winter of 1881) to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a clipping from a printed piece which is almost equivalent (except for a short phrase) to "A Visit, at the Last, to R. W. Emerson" as published in Specimen Days in 1882 (retained, within Specimen Days and with the same title, in the Complete Prose Works, published in 1892). The clipping included in this manuscript was taken from the section " Emerson as He Looks Today" which appeared within the article "How I Still Get Around at 60, and Take Notes" published in the Critic on December 3, 1881.


visit to the Opera, A

Whitman Archive Title: The voice is a curious organ
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00477
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 38
Repository Title: Glimpses of Walt Whitman
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1850-1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1, handwritten, printed
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript scrap might be part of the missing page 8 of another manuscript by Whitman, "A Visit to the Opera," held at the Huntington Library. These and other manuscripts about opera singing bear an obvious relationship with the article "The Opera," published in Life Illustrated on November 10, 1855, although the details of the relationship are unclear. For a description of the intricacies of these various manuscripts, see Edward Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984) 1:388-398. The manuscript is pasted down, making the verso inaccessible.



Whitman Archive Title: A Visit to the Opera
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00038
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository ID: HM 1191
Date: 1855-1860
Genre: prose
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 relatively clean draft of a journalistic piece, entitled "A Visit to the Opera." No published version in this form has been found, though the draft bears many similarities to "The Opera," an article published in the November 10, 1855 issue of Life Illustrated. It is likely that the present draft represents an early stage in the composition of the published article, but it is also possible that it was created later, as a revision intended for publication in a different periodical. Whitman has numbered the pages, although pages 8 and 9 are missing. The draft is signed "Mose Velsor, of Brooklyn," one of Whitman's commonly-used pseudonyms. For more discussion of this draft's relation to "The Opera" and to several other manuscripts, see Edward Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984) 1:388-397.


Vocalism

Whitman Archive Title: Orators
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00193
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 5 leaves, 22 x 13.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: The poem was originally numbered 67, and the partly erased pencil note "Needs to be/ re-written/ or excluded" appears in the upper-right corner of the first leaf. Whitman also numbered the leaves in pencil in their lower-left corners. The leaves correspond to verses in section 12 of "Chants Democratic" in the 1860 Leaves of Grass. After excising and altering numerous verses of the poem and numbering different verse paragraphs for the "Chants Democratic" version, Whitman next made the poem the second numbered section of the last "Leaves of Grass" cluster in the 1867 edition. From 1872 to 1876 it bore the title "To Oratists." Then, in 1881, Whitman deleted several lines, joining this poem with a previously unconnected poem known as "Voices" to form "Vocalism" in the cluster "Autumn Rivulets," a position and identity the now-composite poem retained from that point on.



Whitman Archive Title: Voices
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00209
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This poem became section 21 of the cluster "Leaves of Grass" in the 1860 edition. In 1867 Whitman placed it after what would eventually become "All is Truth" and "Germs" as section 3 of a "Leaves of Grass" group in the annex "Songs Before Parting." In 1872 Whitman restored the title "Voices." In 1881 he dropped the first two verses and added "Voices" (as verse paragraph 2) to the previously unrelated poem "To Oratists" to form "Vocalism" in the cluster "Autumn Rivulets".


Voice from Death, A

Whitman Archive Title: A Voice from Death
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00060
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: June 1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 5 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Content: This is a signed manuscript of "A Voice from Death," a poem written in response to the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood in the spring of 1889 in which 2,000 people died after a dam collapsed following torrential rains. This poem was published on June 7, 1889, in the New York World. The manuscript is the printer's copy and each page is mounted separately and bound in a volume with a lettered title page and a portrait frontispiece by E. Whittlesey Kotz.


Voice of the Rain, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Voice of the Rain
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00322
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: The Voice of the Rain (1885). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof sheet of the poem "The Voice of the Rain," which was published first in 1885, with notations in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: The Voice of the Rain
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02466
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: The Voice of the Rain (1885). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof sheet of the poem "The Voice of the Rain," which was published first in 1885, with notations and corrections in Whitman's hand (including a rejected title and a notation on the verso).


Voice, The

Whitman Archive Title: [The Voice]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00173
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: Literary, Undated, The Voice
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes for a poem about the voices inside the heads of Socrates and Joan of Arc.



Whitman Archive Title: Occasional Pieces of Poetry
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03449
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: about 1887–1888
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 13, printed and handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
Content: Whitman's copy of John G. C. Brainard's Occasional Pieces of Poetry (1825), many pages of which bear the poet's handwriting. Whitman appears to have used the volume as a notebook of sorts, for while some of the writing seems to be related to Brainard's text most of it does not. Among the handwritten notes are several sets of ideas for poems that were never published and phrases that also appear in Whitman's personal correspondence. Some of these are phrases that Whitman inscribed in the copy of Complete Poems & Prose (1888) that he gave to Horace Traubel. On other pages are words from his letter to Anne Gilchrist of November 11, 1871. These were perhaps copied into the Brainard volume as he worked to write a poem in Gilchrist's honor, though they did not make it into "Going Somewhere," the poetic tribute that Whitman published in the November 1887 issue of Lippincott's Magazine (without individual title, but in a group of four poems collectively labelled "November Boughs"). A draft of "Going Somewhere" appears elsewhere in this volume. Also present is a draft of "The Dismantled Ship," which was first published in the New York Herald on February 23, 1888. Both poems were later included in November Boughs (1888) and in subsequent printings of Leaves of Grass. Only those pages with Whitman's handwritten notes are linked from this record. For a more complete discussion of this item, see Nicole Gray, "Walt Whitman's Marginalia as Occasional Practice," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 107 (December 2013), 467–494.


Voices, Recitatives

Whitman Archive Title: [Voices, Recitatives]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00036
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1867–1892
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Notes and draft lines on the "rich man's just awakened soul." The connection between this manuscript and Whitman's published work is unclear.


Wallabout Martyrs, The

Whitman Archive Title: The Wallabout Martyrs
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00171
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 17
Date: 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 11.5 cm x 20.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: This manuscript contains a draft version of the poem "The Wallabout Martyrs" first published in the New York Herald, March 16, 1888. A note at the bottom states: "sent to Herald March 11" indicating the draft was likely completed around the time of publication. On the verso of the leaves appear scraps of a letter and an envelope addressed to Whitman in Camden.


Walt Whitman, a Brooklyn Boy

Whitman Archive Title: In the present state of
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00061
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A phrase from this manuscript appears, slightly revised, in a review written by Whitman of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. that Whitman wrote for the Brooklyn Daily Times. The review appeared unsigned in the August 29, 1855, issue of the Brooklyn Daily Times. The date of the manuscript is therefore probably before or early in 1855.



Whitman Archive Title: Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00749
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 20
Folder: Leaves of Grass. 1855 edition. Book reviews. Printed copies with corrections and notations.
Date: 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Printed copies of reviews that were reprinted in Leaves of Grass and that include Whitman's corrections and notations. "Walt Whitman a Brooklyn Boy. Leaves of Grass (A Volume of Poems Just Published)" was first printed in the 29 September 1855 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Times. "Walt Whitman and his Poems" was first published in the September 1855 issue of United States Review.


Walt Whitman and his Poems

Whitman Archive Title: Lofty sirs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00387
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 31
Folder: before 1855, "I Am a Born Democrat," draft
Date: Between 1840 and 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Edward Grier concludes that this manuscript was likely written before 1855 because of its similarity to several of the notebooks that Whitman wrote from that period (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2110). Ideas in this manuscript are similar to ideas in the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself," and lines and phrases from the manuscript appear in another manuscript that may have contributed to the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself": see "I know many beautiful things" (tex.00031.html). The tone of the statements is also consistent with Whitman's early journalistic and editorial persona. Ideas and words from this manuscript are also similar to ideas and words that appeared in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. There is also a chance this manuscript relates to language in a Whitman-authored review of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, titled "Walt Whitman and His Poems," originally published in the United States Review. An image of the reverse of this manuscript is currently unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: there are leading moral truths
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00019
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript around 1855. Based on the handwriting and the size of the scrap, Edward Grier dates it to the 1850s, though he also notes that an archival notation on the mounting page next to the manuscript dates it to 1870 (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 6:2140). Wording and ideas in the manuscript bear some resemblance to sentences in "Walt Whitman and His Poems," a review Whitman wrote of the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The review was published in The United States Review in September, 1855. It was also part of a series of reviews printed separately and included in some copies of the 1855 edition.



Whitman Archive Title: I say that Democracy
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05314
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Leaves of Grass
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00749
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 20
Folder: Leaves of Grass. 1855 edition. Book reviews. Printed copies with corrections and notations.
Date: 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Printed copies of reviews that were reprinted in Leaves of Grass and that include Whitman's corrections and notations. "Walt Whitman a Brooklyn Boy. Leaves of Grass (A Volume of Poems Just Published)" was first printed in the 29 September 1855 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Times. "Walt Whitman and his Poems" was first published in the September 1855 issue of United States Review.


Walt Whitman [by Richard Maurice Bucke]

Whitman Archive Title: [His theory is]
Whitman Archive ID: med.00780
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: about 1883
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: Manuscript known only from a transcription published in Wake 7 (Autumn 1948), 10. At that time, the manuscript was in the private collection of Milton Einstein; its current whereabouts are unknown. The contents of the manuscript set forth the "theory . . . that there are two natures in Walt Whitman," one full of "benevolence tenderness and sympathy" and another "far sterner," encompassing "things evil." Whitman wrote this passage for Maurice Bucke's 1883 biography Walt Whitman (Philadelphia: David McKay), where the words are put in the mouth of an unnamed acquaintance, a "distant relative" of the poet (56).



Whitman Archive Title: Memoranda
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04433
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Date: about 1883
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3
Content: Three-page draft of "The Attempted Official Suppression," a section of Part 2, Chapter 1, "History of Leaves of Grass," in Richard Maurice Bucke's 1883 biography, Walt Whitman.



Whitman Archive Title: Here is a list of the immediate family
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00215
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 5
Repository Title: Family member list with birthdays, notes,
Date: about 1883
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one side of this leaf is a list of Whitman's family members, which Whitman wrote for inclusion in the introduction to Richard Maurice Bucke's 1883 biography, Walt Whitman. The writing on the reverse side is in both Whitman's and Bucke's hands and has been cancelled. It consists of draft versions of the heading for William Douglas O'Connor's The Good Gray Poet (1866), which was reprinted in the biography.


Walt Whitman Departures

Whitman Archive Title: [Philadelphia, Pa]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00166
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: c. 1880-81, Comrades.
Date: about 1880-81
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 7 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
Content: A small notebook held together by a pin with notes and trial lines for a poem about comrades.


Walt Whitman in Camden

Whitman Archive Title: Authors at Home - No. VII
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00039
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Walt Whitman at Camden
Repository ID: HM 1196
Date: 1885
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 9 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18
Content: Draft of an article entitled "Walt Whitman in Camden" that Whitman published pseudonymously in The Critic on 25 February 1885. The article, published under the name "George Selwyn," was part of a series called "American Authors at Home" that ran for several volumes in 1885. The article would later be reprinted by The Critic Co. in 1898 as a separate pamphlet entitled Walt Whitman at Home, which credited Whitman as the author of the piece.


Walt Whitman is putting the

Whitman Archive Title: [Walt Whitman is putting the later touches]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00395
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 19
Repository Title: Walt Whitman is putting the later touches...
Repository ID: #3829-i
Date: 1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains part of an autobiographical sketch on the composition of Good-bye My Fancy. At the top left of the manuscript is the date November 10, 1890. A paragraph based on this draft was published in the Critic on November 29, 1890 along with many similar notes about other authors under the heading "Of Making Many Books." On the verso of the manuscript is the letter from the editors of the Critic, dated November 1, 1890, in which they solicited Whitman's contribution.


Walt Whitman [The late Dartmouth College utterance]

Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman [The late Dartmouth College utterance]
Whitman Archive ID: buf.00003
Repository: University at Buffalo
Date: 1872
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: A seemingly complete draft of a piece of journalism, with corrections and notes to the printer, written in late June 1872. The specificity of Whitman's notes to the printer, including instructions about which page and column to print the piece on, would suggest that Whitman had a specific paper in mind for its publication. It is unclear, however, which paper, if any, ever published the piece. Whitman's instructions to publish the article "on Friday June 28th or Saturday June 29th [1872]" would suggest that it was a daily paper, possibly in Washington, D.C., where Whitman was living at the time. Written in the third-person, the piece reviews Whitman's own performance at Dartmouth College's commencement in 1872, where he read his newly published poem, "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free." The article then turns to a broader discussion of the style and themes of Whitman's poetry, with speculation about whether he may be "a real national poet." It reaches the conclusion that "Walt Whitman is certainly taking position as an original force and new power in literature." At the end is pasted a corrected proof of the poem "By Broad Potomac's Shore," which Whitman intended to be published along with the self-review. The poem had first appeared in the just-published volume As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free (1872), along with the title poem and five others.


Walt Whitman: What the Poet Does and How He Lives in St. Louis—Loafing and Inviting His Soul

Whitman Archive Title: [under Personal]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00315
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: Walt Whitman still remains in St. Louis, Missouri…
Date: 1879
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Short press release, with several revisions, written sometime in the last three months of 1879, during Whitman's stay at St. Louis with his brother Jeff, following his train trip to Colorado. No newspaper printing of this note has been located. Much of the material here did appear, however, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on December 17, 1879, in an article titled "Walt Whitman: What the Poet Does and How He Lives in St. Louis—Loafing and Inviting His Soul." See Jim McWilliams, "An Unknown 1879 Profile of Whitman," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 11.3 (1994), 141–143.


Walt Whitman's Birthday

Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman's birthday
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00046
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1884
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: A fair copy of "Walt Whitman's Birthday," a short article that appeared in the 31 May 1884 issue of the Philadelphia Times.


Walt Whitman's Last

Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman's Last—Good-Bye My Fancy
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00146
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 52
Date: 1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of "Walt Whitman's Last," which appeared in Lippincott's Magazine (August 1891). On the verso of this manuscript is an incoming letter from F. A. Hilliard, dated 25 May 1891.



Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman's Last
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00353
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 167
Date: 1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A corrected proof of "Walt Whitman's Last," a short treatise on the theory behind Leaves of Grass, which includes a plug for Whitman's latest work, Good-Bye My Fancy. This piece of prose appeared in the August 1891 issue of Lippincott's Magazine.


Walt Whitman's Last 'Public'

Whitman Archive Title: Death of Abraham Lincoln
Whitman Archive ID: upa.00152
Repository: University of Pennsylvania: Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Box: 2
Folder: 64
Date: 1889-1890
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a passage that appears almost verbatim in "Walt Whitman's Last Public," included within the Memoranda section of Complete Prose Works published in 1892. In the piece, written in third person, Whitman describes the speech he gave on the 25th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's death at the Art Rooms, in Philadelphia, on April 15, 1890, and the passage appearing in this manuscript is reported to be the literal opening address of the talk. We don't have certainty that this is true, though, as we do not have a written version of the talk. Some phrases in this version also bear resemblance with the printed version of 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 were also originally published as "Abraham Lincoln's Death. Walt Whitman's Account of the Scene at Ford's Theatre", in the New York Sun on 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 on 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 in 1892.


Walt Whitman's Poem

Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman's Poem
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00528
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1859
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of a notice for "A Child's Reminiscence," a poem which first appeared in the 24 December 1859 issue of the New-York Saturday Press. This manuscript is catalogued with other "advance notices" of "A Child's Reminiscence" that do not seem to have appeared in print, though Whitman indicated with which periodical each of them would be placed. "Walt Whitman's Poem" appeared—as Whitman himself notes on the manuscript—"under editorial head Saturday Press Dec 24."


Walt Whitman's Poem To-Day at Dartmouth College

Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman's poem to-day at Dartmouth College
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00327
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 118
Date: 1872
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 7 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
Content: A draft of "Walt Whitman's Poem Today at Dartmouth College," an essay announcing the commencement poem Whitman delivered at Dartmouth June 26, 1872. This piece was published in the 26 June 1872 issue of the Washington Evening Star and includes excerpts from Whitman's poem, "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood," originally published in the New York Herald 26 June 1872 under the title "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free." This poem was later published with seven other poems in a pamphlet, As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free (1872). It was also included in a supplement bound with Two Rivulets (1876). Whitman eventually changed the title to "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood," added a new opening stanza, made additional revisions, and incorporated the poem into Leaves of Grass (1881–82).


Walter Whitman, of Suffolk co

Whitman Archive Title: Walter Whitman, of Suffolk co.
Whitman Archive ID: med.00724
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: September 3, 1841
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: This manuscript consists of a note, handwritten by Whitman, in a visitor's book for Manhattan Public School #13. Whitman's entry, dated September 3, 1841, is one of several on the page. A photostat of the page can be found in Florence Bernstein Freedman, Walt Whitman Looks at the Schools (New York: King's Crown Press, 1950): facing page 32.


Wandering at Morn

Whitman Archive Title: The Singing Thrush
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00019
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: The Singing Thrush (1873). A.MS. draft.
Date: February 28, 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 12 x 19 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A draft of "The Singing Thrush"(first published in 1873 and later published under the title "Wandering at Morn") written in pencil, with corrections and changes (some in ink) on a folded sheet of stationery. The draft is signed and dated Washington, February 28, 1873.


Wants

Whitman Archive Title: Wants
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00150
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository Title: Wants (Autograph MS, draft portions of an essay on labor advertisements)
Date: Between 1841 and 1862
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 7 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
Content: This manuscript appears to be a draft of a piece of journalism, although it is not known if the piece was ever published. While Whitman wrote journalistic pieces throughout his life, the handwriting, ink, and paper are most consistent with manuscripts known to have been written before the first appearance of Leaves of Grass in 1855. Edward Grier details some of the reasons for beilieving the manuscript to date to between 1841 and 1862 in Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:88.


War, though with two sides, really ONE IDENTITY (as struggles, furious conflicts of Nature, for final harmony.)—The Soil it bred and ripen'd from—the North as responsible for it as the South, The

Whitman Archive Title: [Already as I write]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00242
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: between 1872 and 1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript, heavily revised, made from four scraps of paper. Two of the scraps (the second and fourth) were inscribed before being cut apart to insert the material on the third scrap. This manuscript probably represents Whitman's reworking of a passage from the "Preface" of As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free. And Other Poems (1872), which was reprinted as Preface, 1872, to "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free," (now "Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood," in permanent ed'n.) in Two Rivulets (1876), Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), and Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman revised the passage for use in "The War, though with two sides, really ONE IDENTITY (as struggles, furious conflicts of Nature, for final harmony.)—The Soil it bred and ripen'd from—the North as responsible for it as the South," which appeared in the "Notes" section of Memoranda During the War (1875–1876). This piece was also reprinted in Two Rivulets (1876).


Warble for Lilac-Time

Whitman Archive Title: Branches & sprigs of lilacs
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00013
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 2
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A note expressing Whitman's intentions for the revision of a poem or group of poems, the identity of which is uncertain. A connection to "Warble for Lilac-Time," first published in 1870, seems likely, however.



Whitman Archive Title: Songs for Lilac-times
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00045
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 4
Repository Title: Songs for lilac times for 1870-71
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, notes
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Title, note, and verse fragment, approximately twenty-five words, probably related to the poem "Warble for Lilac-Time," which was first published in The Galaxy in May 1870. On the verso is a letter drafted in an unknown hand on behalf of the US Attorney General, dated Feb. 12, 1869.



Whitman Archive Title: Warble for Lilac-Time
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00047
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1870-1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 4 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Content: Fair copy draft of the poem "Warble for Lilac-Time," first published in the Galaxy 9 (May 1870). Whitman revised the poem for reprinting in Passage to India (1871), in the New York Daily Graphic (12 May 1873), in the group "Passage to India" of Leaves of Grass (1872) and Two Rivulets (1876), and in its present form in Leaves of Grass (1881-82).


Washington as a Central Winter Residence

Whitman Archive Title: Washington as a Central Winter Residence
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00328
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Folder: 119
Date: 1871–1872
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Content: This manuscript touches on the developing "distinctive metropolitan American Character" of Washington, including the city's status as a literary center. Portions of this manuscript were used in "Washington as a Central Winter Residence" and "Authors of Washington," the latter of which was published in two installments. The first installment appeared in the 6 January 1872 issue of the Washington Evening Star, which also included "Washington as a Central Winter Residence." The second installment was published in the 9 January 1872 issue of the same. For more details regarding how this manuscript contributed to these two pieces of journalism, see Martin G. Murray, "Two Pieces of Uncollected Whitman Journalism: 'Washington as a Central Winter Residence' and 'The Authors of Washington,'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 20 (Winter/Spring 2003), 151-176.


Washington in the Hot Season [New York Times 16 Aug 1863]

Whitman Archive Title: Locust whirring they come in July
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00467
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 1
Folder: 1
Date: About the 1850s or 1860s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains two written statements or observations, one about locusts and the other about sunflowers. Although the text is written with the hanging indentation characteristic of Whitman's poetry, it is unclear if these were ever intended as poetic lines. The note about locusts—"Locust whirring they come in July & are loud in August"—is similar to a description of Washington, D.C., in a piece of Civil War journalism titled "Washington in the Hot Season." In this article, published in the New-York Times on August 16, 1863, Whitman writes of the grounds around the U.S. Capitol building in the summertime and notes that there are "locusts whirring." Whether this manuscript directly contributed to this piece of journalism or not, it seems likely that it was composed in the 1850s or 1860s. On the reverse of the leaf (tex.00005) are approximately five lines toward a poem about the effects of war that was never published in Whitman's lifetime.


Washington's Monument, February, 1885

Whitman Archive Title: Thou, Washington, art the worlds
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00009
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository ID: MA 931 (B)
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An early draft of the poem originally published as "Ah, Not This Granite Dead and Cold" in the Philadelphia Press on February 22, 1885. It would later be reprinted as "Washington's Monument, February, 1885" in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888). This draft, written on both sides of a thin leaf of paper, is the earliest of the four drafts of this poem held at the Pierpont Morgan Library (the others are pml.00005, pml.00001, and pml.00010).



Whitman Archive Title: Ah, Not This Granite Dead and Cold
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00067
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Ah, Not This Granite Dead and Cold (1885). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 24.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof with Whitman's holograph corrections. Published first under this title in 1885. Later published as "Washington's Monument, February, 1885."



Whitman Archive Title: Ah, not this granite dead and cold
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00001
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository ID: MA 627
Date: February 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Draft of the poem originally published as "Ah, Not This Granite Dead and Cold" in the Philadelphia Press on February 22, 1885. It would later be reprinted as "Washington's Monument, February, 1885" in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888). This is a later draft than pml.00005 and pml.00009. An image of the verso is currently unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Beyond this granite dead and cold
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00005
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository ID: MA 931.1
Date: February 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of the poem originally published as "Ah, Not This Granite Dead and Cold" in the Philadelphia Press on February 22, 1885. It would later be reprinted as "Washington's Monument, February, 1885" in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888). This draft (a later draft than pml.00009 but earlier than pml.00001) is written on a piece of paper with an envelope pasted at the bottom, postmarked February 18, 1885.



Whitman Archive Title: Ah, not that granite dead and cold!
Whitman Archive ID: pml.00010
Repository: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Repository Title: Washington's Monument, February, 1885: autograph manuscript drafts of the poem
Repository ID: MA 931 (C)
Date: February 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A late draft of the poem originally published as "Ah, Not This Granite Dead and Cold" in the Philadelphia Press on February 22, 1885. It would later be reprinted as "Washington's Monument, February, 1885" in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888). This draft is the latest of the four drafts of this poem held at the Pierpont Morgan Library (the others are pml.00009, pml.00005, and pml.00001). An image of the verso is currently unavailable.


We Two, How Long We were Fool'd

Whitman Archive Title: You and I
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00181
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, all leaves 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Originally numbered 84, this poem appeared in the 1860 Leaves of Grass as main section 7 of "Enfans d'Adam," and was retitled within the group "We Two—How Long We Were Fool'd" in 1867.


Week's Visit to Boston, A

Whitman Archive Title: Out West not Long Since
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00488
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Date: 1880-1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: This manuscript is a partial draft of "A Week's Visit to Boston" published in Specimen Days in 1882.


What am I After All

Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [What am I after all but a]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00210
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This poem became section 22 of the cluster "Leaves of Grass" in the 1860 edition. In 1867 Whitman dropped the second 1860 verse and made it section 4 of a "Leaves of Grass" group in the annex "Songs Before Parting". Whitman gave it the title "What Am I After All" in Passage to India (1871), and in 1881 it was finally transferred to the cluster "Autumn Rivulets."


What cannot

Whitman Archive Title: [What cannot meet all]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05179
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


What Lurks Behind Shakspere's Historical Plays?

Whitman Archive Title: What lurks behind Shakespeare's historical plays?
Whitman Archive ID: fol.00003
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library
Repository Title: What lurks behind Shakespeare's historical plays? [manuscript], ca. 1884
Repository ID: S.b.89
Date: 1884
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 6 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Content: A late-stage manuscript of Whitman's essay "What lurks behind Shakespeare's historical plays?", which was first published in the Critic on September 27, 1884. The piece would later be republished in November Boughs (1888) and Complete Prose Works (1892). The manuscript contains detailed handwritten instructions to the printer, as well as various corrections made by Whitman in red ink.


What Place is Besieged?

Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [What place is besieged]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00320
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one leaf of pink paper (21.5 x 13 cm), in black ink, with a fair copy of the poem at the bottom of the leaf and a deleted draft featuring heavy revisions in the same ink and in pencil at the top. This poem was originally numbered 68, and its title was "Leaflet—." In 1860 it became the second numbered verse paragraph of section 31 of "Calamus." In 1867 Whitman split up the two paragraphs and made them separate poems; these verses were moved to a position between the "Calamus" and a "Leaves of Grass" cluster and permanently retitled "What Place Is Besieged?" In 1881 the poem was transferred to the cluster "Inscriptions."



Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


What Ship Puzzled at Sea

Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


What Think You I Take My Pen in Hand?

Whitman Archive Title: [What think you I have]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00338
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 8.5 x 9 cm pasted to 6.5 x 9 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On a composite leaf of white wove paper consisting of two sections (8.5 x 9 and 6.5 x 9 cm) pasted together. Both sections are in black ink but, as Bowers notes, the lower verses were inscribed using a darker, thicker pen; the upper section is unrevised, but the lower section bears several alterations in the original ink. Pinholes at top of both sections and in the current center. Whitman numbered the page 9, in pencil, in the lower-left corner. Originally the sixth section of the sequence "Live Oak, with Moss," this poem was revised to form section 32 of "Calamus" in 1860, and in 1867 was retitled "What Think You I Take My Pen in Hand?"


What we call Literature is

Whitman Archive Title: What we call literature is
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00295
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 32
Date: 1850s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Prose manuscript expressing the belief that human existence possesses a grandeur that surpasses artistic accomplishments. It is unclear whether this manuscript is related to Whitman's published poetry or prose. Based on the appearance of a transcription of this manuscript with transcriptions of other early manuscripts in Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments (1899), Edward Grier dates it to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1558). The handwriting and the paper also would suggest an early date.


What would it bring you

Whitman Archive Title: What would it bring you
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00017
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two lines of poetry with no known connection to Whitman's published work. On the reverse of the scrap is a single unidentified line of poetry, heavily revised.


When I Heard at the Close of the Day

Whitman Archive Title: [When I heard at the close of]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00339
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 15 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two leaves of white wove paper, both measuring 15 x 9.5 cm; the lower half of the second page is pasted over with a section of white paper (8 x 9 cm) containing four revised verses. In black ink, with revisions in the same ink and in pencil. Pinholes mostly at top of both pages. Whitman numbered the pages 4 and 5, in pencil, in their lower-left corners. The third section of "Live Oak, with Moss" (with ornamental Roman numeral), this poem became section 11 of "Calamus" in 1860 and was permanently retitled "When I Heard at the Close of the Day" in 1867. For an earlier draft of the poem numbered V please see the verso of leaves 15-16 of "Premonition" (1:1:15-16). Bowers (p. 88) supplies the three earlier lines concealed by the paste-on revision to the second leaf. The lines on the first page correspond to verses 1-5 of the 1860 version, and those on the second page ("And when I thought how/ my friend,...") to lines 6-13.


When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

Whitman Archive Title: Mocking all the textbooks and
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00024
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: [wider than the west]
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The general sentiment expressed in this manuscript fragment and the reference to "proofs and diagrams" are reminiscent of the poem "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer." That poem was not published until its inclusion in Drum-Taps in 1865. Edward Grier dates this manuscript to "before or early in 1855," however, probably because of the draft lines on the reverse of the leaf, which contributed to lines in the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass. Grier, drawing from Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments (1899), also adds a bracketed conclusion to this prose note: "[We are so proud of our learning! As if it were anything to analyze fluids and call certain parts oxygen or hydrogen, or to map out stars and call . . .]" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:164). These lines do not currently appear on the manuscript.


When I Read the Book

Whitman Archive Title: The Biography
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00082
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: about 1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 18 by 11 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily revised draft of the poem "When I Read the Book" that extends onto the verso. The poem was first published in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass before being revised for inclusion in the "Inscriptions" cluster of the 1871 edition. This draft seems to correspond more closely to the earlier version of the poem, although it contains several lines that do not appear in either version.


When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

Whitman Archive Title: [Hermit Thrush]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00110
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (1865-66). A.MS. notes.
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 4 leaves, 10.5 x 6.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Notes about the hermit thrush in a small homemade notebook, which are related to lines in the poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," first published in 1865.



Whitman Archive Title: [Reminiscences]
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00033
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Date: 1864-1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A manuscript fragment containing what appear to be poetic lines written about the dead of the Civil War, and which are included at the Huntington Library with a group of notes labeled "Hospital Notes 1863." Edward Grier suggests that these lines may have been for an early version of a lecture that Whitman intended to give on "The Dead in this War." The lines also anticipate portions of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." The manuscript is labeled "Reminiscences 64" at the top.



Whitman Archive Title: sorrow
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00052
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Beat! Beat! Drums! (1861). A. MS. draft.
Date: 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: A list of about ninety words expressing sorrow. These words were evidently used as Whitman composed "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," first published in 1865.



Whitman Archive Title: In mem. of A.L.
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07040
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: For funeral piece
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07041
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.


While Not the Past Forgetting

Whitman Archive Title: [Lay on the graves of all dead soldiers]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00190
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Decoration Day. A.MS. draft
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21 x 21.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Trial lines for a poem published posthumously as "[While Not the Past Forgetting]," Notes in a hand other than Whitman's appear on the reverse.



Whitman Archive Title: While not the past forgetting
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00008
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 11
Date: about 1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a manuscript draft of the poem, "While Not the Past Forgetting." Whitman claimed that the poem was published on May 30, 1888, though no copy of such a version has yet been located. The poem was published in November Boughs in 1888.


While the schools and the

Whitman Archive Title: [While the schools]
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00066
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: Preface to Leaves of Grass
Repository ID: HM 6714
Date: between 1863 and 1867
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Although the repository groups this manuscript with two other leaves and ties them all to the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, it appears that this is a separate manuscript and that none of them are related to the 1855 Preface. This manuscript was likely written in the mid-1860s and was never published.


Whispers of Heavenly Death [cluster]

Whitman Archive Title: As of Eternity
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00307
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two leaves of pink paper, both 21 x 13 cm, in black ink, with minor revisions in the same ink. Pinholes mostly in center and at top of both pages. This poem became section 21 of "Calamus" in 1860; the lines on the first manuscript page became verses 1-6, and those on the second ("I hear not the volumes of/ sound merely—...") became 7-9. Retitled "That Music Always Round Me" in 1867, it was transferred in 1871 to the "Whispers of Heavenly Death" cluster in Passage to India. In 1881 Whitman incorporated it, with the rest of the cluster, in the main body of Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [O dying! Always dying!]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00319
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 21.5 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: On one light blue Williamsburgh tax blank (21.5 x 12 cm), in dark brown ink, with revisions in fine pen and pencil. Whitman penciled in a question mark, in parentheses, next to the title. With the addition of the new first line "O love!" this became section 27 of "Calamus" in 1860. In the 1867 Leaves it was retitled "O Living Always—Always Dying!" Whitman next transferred it to the "Passage to India" supplement bound in with Leaves, where it reappeared in 1876; in the 1881 Leaves Whitman permanently added it to the cluster "Whispers of Heavenly Death."


Whispers of Heavenly Death [poem]

Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


Whitman, Walt

Whitman Archive Title: [Walt Whitman (from Holland and English]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00335
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 126
Date: 1890–1891
Genre: prose
Physical Description: , handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of a biographical entry on Whitman that appeared nearly verbatim in G. Washington Moon's Men and Women of the Time: A Dictionary of Contemporaries (Routledge 1891).


Who is now reading this?

Whitman Archive Title: 43—Leaf
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00317
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 21.5 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: The original title was "Leaflet." On the second page Whitman added, in a combination of normal and blue pencil, the number 43 (1/2). With the addition of a new first line ("1. Who is now reading this?") the poem became section 16 of "Calamus" in 1860; the lines on the first draft page correspond to verses 2-8 and those on the second page ("Or as if interior in me") to verses 9-10. This was the first and last appearance of the poem during Whitman's lifetime: he rejected it from his "Blue Book Copy" of Leaves of Grass in 1860.


Who Learns My Lessons Complete

Whitman Archive Title: Poem incarnating the mind
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00346
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks, Before 1855
Date: Before 1855
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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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: The Great Laws do not treasure chips
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00264
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 9
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript includes language similar to lines that appeared in two of the poems in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, later titled "A Song for Occupations" and "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?" On the reverse (duk.00905) are cancelled lines, beginning "hands are cut," which later appeared, in a revised form, in "Faces," which was originally published as the sixth untitled poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.



Whitman Archive Title: born at all is equally
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00100
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: born at all is equally wonderful
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman revised this poetic fragment and used it in "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?" a poem that was untitled when it first appeared as the eleventh poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. On the reverse (nyp.00734) is a list of words that Whitman might have used in composing two of the other poems for that edition.



Whitman Archive Title: Rule in all addresses
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00163
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, Rule in All Addresses.
Date: Before 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Lines and phrases on both the recto and verso of this manuscript contributed to portions of the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself," and possibly to other sections of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, suggesting a composition date before 1855. However, this manuscript also includes lines that probably contributed to "Sun-Down Poem" (later retitled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry") in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. It is possible that some of these poetic lines contributed to the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. A line in this manuscript is similar to the following line, in the poem later titled "Song of Myself": "I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself" (1855, p. 17). Another line is similar to the lines "And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's-self is" (1855, p. 53) and "And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man" (1855, p. 26). Another manuscript line is similar to the line "Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man" (1855, p. 23). And several manuscript lines are similar to the lines beginning "Not merely of the New World but of Africa Europe or Asia . . . . a wandering savage, / A farmer, mechanic, or artist . . . . a gentleman, sailor, lover or quaker, / A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician or priest" (1855, p. 24). Three other lines are similar to: "Storming enjoying planning loving cautioning, / Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, / I tread day and night such roads" (1855, p. 38). Edward Grier speculates that Whitman's note "Don't forget the bombardment" relates to the "bombardment" of the "old artillerist" in "Song of Myself": "I am an old artillerist, and tell of some fort's bombardment . . . . and am there again" (1855, p. 40). (See Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:165). Several phrases of the prose on the verso were probably later used, in somewhat revised form, in the following lines from "Sun-down Poem" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass: "The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious, / My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Would not people laugh at me?" (1856, p. 216). The poem was later titled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." It is possible that some of the poetic lines on the verso contributed to the prose preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines "I am too great to be a mere President or Major General / I remain with my fellows—with mechanics, and farmers and common people" may relate to the sentence from the preface that reads: "Other states indicate themselves in their deputies....but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors...but always most in the common people" (1855, p. iii). The line "I remain with them all on equal terms" may also be related to the following line in the preface: "The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms" (1855, p. vii). The line "In me are the old and young the fool and the wise thinker" may be related to a similar phrase in the poem eventually titled "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?": "The stupid and the wise thinker" (1855, p. 92). The phrase "mother of many children" appears in both the preface and in the poem later titled "Faces."



Whitman Archive Title: Have you known that your
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.nyp.00095
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: Have you known that your limbs must not dangle
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript bears some similarity in subject to the poem that became "Who Learns My Lesson Complete," though there does not appear to be any specific contribution of lines or phrases. In his transcription of this manuscript, Richard Maurice Bucke combined it with three other manuscripts: see nyp.00097, uva.00283, and uva.00134 (Notes and Fragments [London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899], 28–29). Though the subject matter is similar, the manuscripts do not appear to be continuous. The manuscript has been pasted down, so an image of the back of the leaf is unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: Remember how many pass their
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.nyp.00097
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Repository Title: Remember how many pass their whole lives
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: This manuscript bears some similarity in subject to the poem that became "Who Learns My Lesson Complete," though there does not appear to be any specific contribution of lines or phrases. In his transcription of this manuscript, Richard Maurice Bucke combined it with three other manuscripts: see nyp.00095, uva.00283, and uva.00134 (Notes and Fragments [London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899], 28–29). Though the subject matter is similar, the manuscripts do not appear to be continuous. The manuscript has been pasted down, so an image of the back of the leaf is unavailable.



Whitman Archive Title: [As to you]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00134
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 49
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 7 x 15.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript bears some similarity in subject to the poem that became "Who Learns My Lesson Complete," though there does not appear to be any specific contribution of lines or phrases. This leaf was evidently pasted to and then pulled away from another page; some fragments of that other page remain affixed to the top. In his transcription of this manuscript, Richard Maurice Bucke combined it with three other manuscripts: see nyp.00095, nyp.00097, and uva.00283 (Notes and Fragments [London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899], 28–29). Though the subject matter is similar, the manuscripts do not appear to be continuous.



Whitman Archive Title: [med Cophósis]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00005
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 39
Folder: Literary, Before 1855, Women
Date: Between 1852 and 1854
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: These pages were written by Whitman in the early to mid-1850s. William White described the pages as "torn from a tall notebook" (Daybooks and Notebooks [New York: New York University Press, 1978], 773–777). White noted a relationship between these pages and the poems "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Song of the Answerer," and "There Was a Child Went Forth." Some of the ideas and language being worked out here also appear in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." For a discussion of the dating and importance of this notebook, see Matt Miller, Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 11–16.



Whitman Archive Title: I cannot guess what the
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00079
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The lines do not have any known direct relation to Whitman's published poetry. At one point, however, the manuscript was almost certainly part of "The Great Laws do not" (duk.00264), which includes draft lines that appeared in that edition. On the back of this leaf (tex.00321) is a partial draft of the poem eventually titled "Faces." Both manuscript drafts were probably originally continuous with manuscript drafts on the leaf from which this leaf was cut.


Who shall write

Whitman Archive Title: [Who shall write]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00054
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: Who shall write--who tell--who paint…
Date: probably between 1855 and 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Fragment of approximately forty words, in which the poet writes that if he "were younger & well" he would write a book containing "the lessons of one mere day and night—the picture of the sky." No connection has been established between this manuscript and any of Whitman's published works.


[Who wills with his own brain]

Whitman Archive Title: [Who wills with his own brain]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00283
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 5 x 16 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft lines of an incomplete poem, of which other parts may have been lost or never written. These lines display some similarities to the eleventh untitled poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, named "Lesson Poem" in 1856 and finally, beginning with 1871's Passage to India, "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?"


Whole poem

Whitman Archive Title: Whole Poem
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00252
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 30
Date: about 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Manuscript containing ideas for a poem about insects. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Poem of Language." An image of the verso is unavailable.


Wild Flowers

Whitman Archive Title: September and October wild flowers
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00071
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 42
Repository Title: This has been & is
Date: 1878–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: Notes on flowers that Whitman revised and used in "Wild Flowers," which appeared in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883) and Complete Prose Works (1892).



Whitman Archive Title: [Out of mere civility]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00072
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 42
Repository Title: Out of mere civility
Date: 1878–1882
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: A heavily revised sentence, which Whitman revised even further before including in "Wild Flowers," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883). Whitman included "Wild Flowers" in Complete Prose Works (1892).


Winter-Day on the Sea-Beach, A

Whitman Archive Title: [Mid-day on the Beach]
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00043
Repository: University of California, Berkeley: The Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The Bancroft Library
Box: 1
Folder: 59
Repository Title: Mid-day on the beach
Date: 1878
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: Various scraps of paper, including two clippings of Whitman's own published prose, pasted together to create two separate leaves. Portions of this manuscript first appeared in "Winter Sunshine: A Trip from Canada to the Coast," Philadelphia Times, 26 January 1879. This manuscript contains a nearly complete draft of "A Winter Day on the Beach," a section of prose that appeared in the 29 January 1881 issue of The Critic as "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes. (No. 1)," under the heading "A Fine Winter Day on the Beach." Whitman dated this draft December 1878, and the manuscript shows evidence of title revisions. A revised version of this prose piece was eventually published as part of Specimen Days & Collect (1882–1883), and finally collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). On the verso of the second leaf is a portion of a letter from A. B. Ashley to Whitman, requesting an autograph.


With All Thy Gifts

Whitman Archive Title: With all the gifts America
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00324
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: With All Thy Gifts (1876). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1873
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft entitled "With all the gifts America," published in 1873 under the title "With All Thy Gifts."


With Antecedents

Whitman Archive Title: a volume
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00301
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 33
Date: before 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Note suggesting a piece of writing to span "the whole range of recorded time," possibly related to "With Antecedents," which was first published in the New-York Saturday Press (1860) as "You and Me and To-day." The poem was revised as "Chants Democratic. 7" in Leaves of Grass (1860–1861) and took its final title, "With Antecedents," in the 1867 Leaves. This scrap has been attached by a collector or archivist to a backing sheet, together with "Remember in Scientific."



Whitman Archive Title: [(illeg.) Dick Hunt]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00028
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: 1857 Trial Lines and Descriptions
Date: 1856-1857
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 90 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 246–280, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "To a Common Prostitute," "You Felons on Trial in Courts," "Starting from Paumanok," "Trickle Drops," "I Was Looking for a Long While," "Poem of Joys," "Facing West from California's Shores," "To the States," "A Song of the Rolling Earth," "On the Beach a Night Alone," "Full of Life Now," and "With Antecedents."



Whitman Archive Title: Evolutions
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00187
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 6 leaves, 21 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Content: On six leaves of pink paper. The deleted title is "Poemet—." "Evolutions.—" is written in light ink, and the number "41—" in a darker ink than the text. Whitman numbered each leaf in pencil in the upper right corner. This poem was first published in the January 14, 1860 issue of the New York Saturday Press under the title "You and Me and To-day," after which it became section 7 of "Chants Democratic" in the 1860 Leaves of Grass. In 1867 Whitman ungrouped it and permanently retitled it "With Antecedents"; in 1881 it was permanently transferred to the new cluster "Birds of Passage." The manuscript leaves correspond to the published verses in the 1860 Leaves of Grass.


With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!

Whitman Archive Title: with husky-haughty lips, O sea
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00002
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 170
Date: 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a draft of "With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!," first published in Harper's Monthly Magazine in March 1884, written on the verso of a discarded review of John Burrough's Notes on Walt Whitman. This poem was reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass in 1888 and after.



Whitman Archive Title: With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00034
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a printed draft of the poem, "With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!," with corrections in Whitman's hand. The poem was published first in Harper's Monthly Magazine in March 1884, and was reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass in 1888 and after.



Whitman Archive Title: With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00036
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a printed draft of the poem, "With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!," with corrections in Whitman's hand. The poem was published first in Harper's Monthly Magazine in March 1884, and was reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass in 1888 and later.



Whitman Archive Title: By thine own lips, O Sea
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00014
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: 1883
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is a draft of the poem first published as "With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!" in the March 1884 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine. The poem was reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to the 1888 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman wrote this draft on the back of a sheet of stationery for the Sheldon House of Ocean Grove, New Jersey.



Whitman Archive Title: By day the distant
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00009
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: By Day the Distant Shadowy Sails (1883). A.MS. draft.
Date: October, 1883
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 17 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Lines that likely constitute an early draft of "With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!" This poem was published first in Harper's Monthly Magazine, March, 1884.



Whitman Archive Title: With husky-haughty lips, O sea
Whitman Archive ID: unc.00010
Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Walt Whitman Papers
Folder: 8
Date: about 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a manuscript draft of the poem, "With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!," which was first published in Harper's Monthly in March 1884. Reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: with husky-haughty lips, O Sea!
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00001
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: late 1883 or early 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a signed and revised draft of "With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!," which was published first in Harper's Monthly Magazine in March 1884. This poem was reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass in 1888 and after.



Whitman Archive Title: With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04202
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea! (1883). Printed Copies
Date: 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, printed, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Page from the March, 1884 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine containing Whitman's poem "With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!" Also included is a clipping from an unknown newspaper ("'84" written in Whitman's hand at the bottom) of the same poem.



Whitman Archive Title: By Thine Own Lips, O Sea
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00012
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: By Thine Own Lips, O Sea (1883). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 26 x 20.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An early draft of "With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!" The poem was published in Harper's Monthly, March, 1884,


With the sun and sky

Whitman Archive Title: With the sun and sky
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00510
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 38
Repository Title: Glimpses of Walt Whitman from 1877 to '87
Date: Around 1865
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: A manuscript containing poetic lines with no known relation to any of Whitman's published work. One of the notes at the bottom of the manuscript, "Photo for Pratt," is likely a reference to Alfred Pratt, a young soldier who Whitman befriended at Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C. in 1865. In an August 7, 1865 letter to Whitman, Pratt requests "potographs of Abe and Washington," and in his August 26, 1865 reply to Pratt, Whitman notes that he has sent the picture. If this is the photograph referred to in this manuscript, then the note was written in August 1865, with the poetic lines likely composed slightly earlier (likely the early 1860s). The manuscript is pasted down to a backing sheet, making the verso inaccessible.


Woman Waits for Me, A

Whitman Archive Title: [Yet completion were lacking if]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00037
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Children of Adam. A.MS. draft.
Date: between 1850-1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 26.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains a line used in "Poem of Procreation" in 1856 (later known as "A Woman Waits for Me").



Whitman Archive Title: [Through you I drain the pent-up of rivers]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00038
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Date: between 1850 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 26.5 x 15 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript contains lines that later appeared in "Poem of Procreation" in 1856 (later known as "A Woman Waits for Me").



Whitman Archive Title: [George Walker]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00143
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 37
Folder: 1855-1856, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry trial lines
Date: between 1855-1856
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 45 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:226–243, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Starting from Paumanok," "A Song for Occupations," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Salut au Monde!," "To One Shortly to Die," and "A Woman Waits for Me."


Word About Tennyson, A

Whitman Archive Title: A Word about Tennyson
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00151
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 49
Date: 1886-1887
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 7 leaves, handwritten, print
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
Content: A complete draft of Whitman's essay "A Word About Tennyson," which was first published in the Critic on January 1, 1887. The piece would later appear in the English edition of Democratic Vistas and Other Papers (1888), as well as November Boughs (1888) and Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman has numbered the pages and included a note to the printer at the top of the first leaf.


World Below the Brine, The

Whitman Archive Title: Leaf [Sea-water, and all breathing]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00204
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, 22 x 13 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: The poem was originally numbered 71 and then modified to 72. These 2 leaves contain verses first published in section 16 of the 1860 Leaves of Grass cluster. In 1867 Whitman transferred this poem to a different "Leaves of Grass" group with the poems that would become "Night on the Prairies" and "I Sit and Look Out." After receiving the title "The World Below the Brine" in the 1871 "Sea-Shore Memories" group of Passage to India, the final change was its transfer to the cluster "Sea Drift" within the main body of Leaves of Grass in 1881.


World Take Good Notice

Whitman Archive Title: Rise, Lurid Stars
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00011
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a poem draft, the last three lines of which were later revised and published in Drum-Taps (1865) as "World Take Good Notice" and included in subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass. On the verso of this draft is a prose fragment discussing slavery and Southern aristocracy.



Whitman Archive Title: Up, Lurid Stars!
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00321
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Up, Lurid Stars! (1865). A.MS. draft.
Date: about 1865
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 16 x 20 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Draft of a poem entitled "Up, Lurid Stars!" which was never published in Whitman's lifetime. It is related to the poem "World Take Good Notice," which was first published in 1865.


Wound-Dresser, The

Whitman Archive Title: [While I so deeply loved]
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00150
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 1
Folder: 56
Date: 1864
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This is a manuscript with poem notes relating to Whitman's experience as a nurse during the Civil War, some lines of which correspond to "The Wound-Dresser," first published in Leaves of Grass (1876). The verso contains notes about a call Whitman received from a mother, dated December 23, 1864, regarding her son Frank Lester, an imprisoned soldier. The relationship of these prose notes to Whitman's published work is unknown.


Wounded from Chancellorsville, The

Whitman Archive Title: Dr. L B Russell
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05449
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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).


Write a Drunken Song

Whitman Archive Title: Write A Drunken Song
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00055
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: Write a drunken song…
Date: probably between 1860 and 1875
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Note containing twelve words, wherein Whitman suggests writing "A Drunken Song." The relationship of this manuscript to Whitman's published work is unknown.


Write a new burial service

Whitman Archive Title: Write a new burial service
Whitman Archive ID: med.00733
Repository: Unlocated Manuscripts
Date: 1850s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
Images: currently unavailable
Content: A manuscript comprised of two short sentences, known only from a transcription in Notes & Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (London, Ontario: A. Talbot & Co., printers, 1899), 56. Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances or date of its composition, but Edward Grier argues that the "liturgical intention" of this manuscript suggests a date in the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1313).


write a poem on the

Whitman Archive Title: [write a poem on the theme]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00056
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Box: 2
Folder: 6
Repository Title: Write a poem on the theme the great charge and repulse of the Secesh…
Date: between 1864 and 1890
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Short handwritten note, approximately twenty words, accompanying two pasted-down newspaper clippings. It is unknown which newspaper or newspapers published these items. The accounts describe Major General Winfield Scott Hancock's repulse of the charge led by Major General George E. Pickett at Gettysburg. No definitive connections between this manuscript and Whitman's published work have been established.


Written impromptu in an album

Whitman Archive Title: Written Impromptu in an album
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00343
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 139
Date: 1883
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Notes, dated 26 December 1883, which Whitman wrote to commemorate "these merry Christmas days and nights." The contents of this manuscript were used in Complete Prose (1892), under the title "Written Impromptu in an Album."


WW's book

Whitman Archive Title: My Own Poems
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00096
Repository: Library of Congress: George S. Hellman Collection
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25.5 x 12.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Rough draft of a poem entitled "My Own Poems." This draft was published posthumously as "My Own Poems."


Yankee Antique, A

Whitman Archive Title: [29th Mass.]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00243
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: The material in this one-page manuscript was used in the essay "A Yankee Antique," which was first published in Memoranda during the War (1875–76) and later reprinted in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and in Complete Prose Works (1892). The leaf is pasted to a backing sheet, making the reverse side inaccesssible.



Whitman Archive Title: [He died almost]
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00248
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Manuscript fragment of several short sentences that contributed to the essay "A Yankee Antique," which was first published in Memoranda during the War (1875–76) and later reprinted in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and in Complete Prose Works (1892). The leaf is pasted to a backing sheet, making the reverse side inaccesssible.



Whitman Archive Title: Serg't Harlowe
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00250
Repository: The University of Texas at Austin: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Date: about 1875
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Brief notes about Calvin Harlowe, a Civil War soldier whose death Whitman described in "A Yankee Antique," an essay first published in Memoranda during the War (1875–76) and later reprinted in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) and in Complete Prose Works (1892). The leaf is pasted to a backing sheet, making the reverse side inaccesssible.


Year of Meteors (1859-60)

Whitman Archive Title: And there is the meteor-shower
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06006
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 40
Folder: The voice of Walt Whitman
Date: Between 1855 and 1860
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: One leaf made by pasting together two scraps of pink paper, probably wrappers from the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. This manuscript contains approximately four poetic lines, written and revised in ink, about the 1833 Leonid meteor shower. It is possible that these lines are related to the poem "Year of Meteors. (1859–1860)," although other than a mention of meteors and the description of them as "dazzling," the subject of the manuscript seems to have little to do with the subject of the poem, which is mostly about the portents of the Civil War. "Year of Meteors" was first published in Drum-Taps (1865). Richard Maurice Bucke's transcription of these lines in Notes and Fragments (1899) begins with another version of these lines and an additional line following them. It is possible that these lines were present on the manuscript when he made his transcription but have since been cut off, though it is also possible that Bucke combined transcriptions from separate leaves. The now-absent final line of Bucke's transcription reads, "Such have I in the round house hanging—such pictures name I—and they are but little." If indeed Whitman wrote this line as part of the present manuscript, it would connect it with the early poem "Pictures," unpublished during Whitman's lifetime. Given the use of the 1855 wrapper paper, this was likely composed between late 1855 and 1860. On the reverse side, made up of two different scraps are the trial title "Poem of the Trainer," (loc.06005) which is written in ink, and several fragmentary lines written in pencil (loc.07550), describing a whale hunt and likely related to "Song of Joys".


Years of the Modern

Whitman Archive Title: Songs of Parting
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00298
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 29
Folder: Songs of Parting. A.MS. corrected pages.
Date: about 1881
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 18 leaves, handwritten
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Content: Corrected pages, many originally appearing in the 1876 Leaves of Grass, of cluster "Songs of Parting," containing 17 poems. Opposite a portrait of Whitman, the title page reads, "Songs of Parting, by Walt Whitman, The Poet's Corrected Proof." These corrections were probably intended for the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. The 17 poems included are: "As the Time Draws Nigh," "Ashes of Soldiers," "Years of the Modern," "Thoughts," "Song at Sunset," "My Legacy," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All," "Camps of Green," "Bathed in War's Perfume," "Now Finalé to the Shore," "As they Draw to a Close," "The Untold Want," "Portals," "These Carols," "To the Reader at Parting," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," and "So Long."


Yet, Yet, Ye Downcast Hours

Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, 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
Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass, stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."


Yonnondio

Whitman Archive Title: Note Book Walt Whitman 1333
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05549
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Yonnondio
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00325
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: Yonnondio (1887). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of "Yonnondio," which was published first in 1887, with notes and corrections in Whitman's hand.



Whitman Archive Title: Yonnondio
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00049
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1887-1888
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Heavily revised draft of the poem "Yonnondio," which first appeared in the Critic 11 (26 November 1887). It was reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888).


you cannot define too clearly

Whitman Archive Title: you cannot define too clearly
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00164
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS 68
Date: 1850s
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1
Content: Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 4:1593).


You Felons on Trial in Courts

Whitman Archive Title: [(illeg.) Dick Hunt]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00028
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: 1857 Trial Lines and Descriptions
Date: 1856-1857
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: about 90 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
Content: A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F. Grier, in his edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 246–280, noted that the notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Song of the Broad-Axe," "To a Common Prostitute," "You Felons on Trial in Courts," "Starting from Paumanok," "Trickle Drops," "I Was Looking for a Long While," "Poem of Joys," "Facing West from California's Shores," "To the States," "A Song of the Rolling Earth," "On the Beach a Night Alone," "Full of Life Now," and "With Antecedents."



Whitman Archive Title: Confession and Warning
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00202
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, 21.5 x 12 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Content: After undergoing substantial deletions and revisions this poem became section 13 of the cluster "Leaves of Grass" in 1860, with the manuscript leaves corresponding to the published version as follows: leaf 1 to numbered verse paragraphs 1 (now beginning "O bitter sprig! Confession sprig!") through 3 and 5; leaf 2 ("You felons on trial in courts,") to 4 and most of 6; and leaf 3 ("And I say I am of them—") to the rest of 6. In 1867 Whitman permanently retitled the poem "You Felons on Trial in Courts" and further shortened it by removing the first three verse paragraphs. The poem's final position, in 1881, was in the cluster "Autumn Rivulets."



Whitman Archive Title: [Full of wickedness]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00267
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 1
Folder: 88
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15.5 x 8 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The verses on the recto, while not published word-for-word until 1897, seem to represent an early draft of the poem first published as number 13 of the cluster "Leaves of Grass" in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, and eventually titled "You Felons on Trial in Courts." Whitman's careful script and verse forms here also resemble the methods of inscription used for the "Live Oak, with Moss" poems dated to the post-1856, pre-1860 period. The undeleted notes on the back are titled "Poems". A cartoon hand in the left margin points to the phrase "religious emotions." Whitman's use of the title "Calamus Leaves" dates these notes to the same pre-1860 period as the deleted verses on the recto, since "Calamus-Leaves" was what he renamed the cluster "Live Oak, with Moss" before settling on "Calamus" for the 1860 edition. A section of the notes below the rest (beginning "spirituality—the unknown,...") is inscribed in verse form.


You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me

Whitman Archive Title: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00017
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: [Leaves of grass]
Repository ID: HM 1193
Date: between 1885 and 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, proof with handwritten annotations
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Corrected proof sheet for the poem "You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," which was first published in the November 1887 issue of Lippincott's Magazine in a collection of four poems titled "November Boughs." It was reprinted in Leaves of Grass (1891-1892).



Whitman Archive Title: Sparse, wintry little leaves
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00359
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Note Book Walt Whitman 1333
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05549
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00326
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proof of a collection of four poems ("You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone") under the general title "November Boughs." This proof is made by pasting together proofs of each poem in the order desired.



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02484
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Proof Sheets.
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten, printed
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Proofs of a collection of four poems ("You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone") under the general title "November Boughs."



Whitman Archive Title: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00015
Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Repository Title: [Leaves of grass]
Repository ID: HM 1193
Date: May 1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, proof with handwritten corrections and annotations
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Corrected proof sheet for the poem "You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," dated May 1885. The poem was first published in the November 1887 issue of Lippincott's Magazine in a collection of four poems titled "November Boughs." It was reprinted in Leaves of Grass (1891-1892).



Whitman Archive Title: November Boughs
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04206
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 30
Folder: You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me (1887). Printed Copy.
Date: 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Clipping from a newspaper of four Whitman poems: "You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me," "'Going Somewhere,'" "After the Supper and Talk," and "Not Meagre Latent Boughs Alone." At the top is the title "November Boughs." At the bottom of the clipping is written, in Whitman's hand, "1887." The poems were published first in Lippincott's Magazine, November, 1887.



Whitman Archive Title: You lingering sparse leaves of me.
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00050
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Lightly revised draft of the poem "You lingering sparse leaves of me," first published in Lippincott's Magazine 40 (November 1887) with three other poems, under the title "November Boughs." It was then reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888).



Whitman Archive Title: You tokens diminute and lorn
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00051
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: about 1887
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Three lines of a draft of "You lingering sparse leaves of me," first published in Lippincott's Magazine 40 (November 1887) with three other poems, under the title "November Boughs." It was then reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888).


You Tides With Ceaseless Swell

Whitman Archive Title: Ebb and Flood Tides
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00195
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Literary File
Box: 26
Folder: Ebb and Flood Tides A.MS. draft.
Date: undated
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 15 x 24.25 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An unpublished poem written in ink on a pale tan piece of paper, heavily corrected.



Whitman Archive Title: You tides with ceaseless swell and ebb.
Whitman Archive ID: wwh.00001
Repository: The Walt Whitman House in Camden
Date: about 1884
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript is a draft of the poem, "You Tides With Ceaseless Swell." Writing on the verso (which is made up of fragments of several letters, dated between 1871–1884) indicates that the manuscript was probably created sometime in or after 1884. "You Tides With Ceaseless Swell" is one of eight poems in the "Fancies at Navesink" sequence, which first appeared in print in the August 1885 issue of Nineteenth Century.



Whitman Archive Title: [firm strong]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05102
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [What spells do distant stars]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04168
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [Swelling and ebbing the tides]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04165
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: [What potent spells]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05103
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: You tides with ceaseless swell
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00140
Repository: University of Virginia: Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library
Box: 2
Folder: 26
Date: 1888-1889
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, 25 cm x 19.5 cm, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: One leaf in ink on lined paper with pencil revisions. This poem "You Tides with Ceaseless Swell" was first published as part of the "Fancies at Navesink" group in Nineteenth Century, August 1885.


youth beloved by all, A

Whitman Archive Title: [A youth beloved by all]
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00045
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: 1865-1885
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Two lines written on the top of a piece of letter-head stationery of the Attorney General's Office.


Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night

Whitman Archive Title: Poem incarnating the mind
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00346
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: poet of Materialism
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00104
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 44
Date: 1855 or earlier
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: Manuscript expressing a belief in the continuing "amelioration" of the earth and humankind, written on a scrap of wallpaper. Although it is cast in prose, this may be an early draft of a group of lines, expressing similar thoughts, in "Great Are the Myths," which was first published as the final, untitled, poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. It also bears some resemblance to lines that appeared in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." Whitman continued to revise the poem in later editions of Leaves of Grass. In the 1881–1882 edition, Whitman removed "Great Are the Myths" from Leaves of Grass altogether, except for four lines, which he titled "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night."



Whitman Archive Title: No doubt the efflux of the soul
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00025
Repository: Library of Congress: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
Series: Notes and Notebooks
Box: 38
Folder: Undated Thoughts, Ideas, and Trial lines (3 V.)
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: This notebook consists almost entirely of prose. However, the ideas and language developed throughout the notebook can be linked to a number of poems that appeared in Leaves of Grass, including "Song of Myself," "Great are the Myths" (ultimately shortened to a few lines and titled "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night"), "Faces," "The Sleepers," and "To Think of Time," versions of which appeared in Leaves of Grass in 1855. One manuscript passage is similar to a passage in the preface to the 1855 edition. Thus, this notebook was almost certainly written before that date. Content from the first several paragraphs of this notebook was also used slightly revised in "Song of the Open Road," first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves as "Poem of the Road."



Whitman Archive Title: you know how
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00142
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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.



Whitman Archive Title: Talbot Wilson
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00141
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: Great are the myths
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00259
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 10
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry, prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: These lines are a draft of the following lines in the twelfth poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, a poem that was later titled "Great Are the Myths": "GREAT are the myths . . . . I too delight in them, / Great are Adam and Eve . . . . I too look back and accept them; / Great the risen and fallen nations, and their poets, women, sages, inventors, rulers, warriors and priests." (1855, p. 93). The poem went through many revisions through the different editions of Leaves of Grass, then was permanently dropped in 1881–1882, except the two couplets that became the poem "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night." The reverse of the manuscript (duk.00938) has cancelled prose beginning "The true friends of the Sabbath."



Whitman Archive Title: You lusty and graceflu youth
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00032
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 11
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: An early version of a part of "Great Are the Myths," a poem first published, untitled, as the concluding poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and again in the 1856 edition as "Poem of a Few Greatnesses." The poem went through many revisions through the different editions of Leaves of Grass, then was permanently dropped in 1881–1882, except the two couplets that became the poem "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night." On the reverse (duk.00889) is partially cancelled verse beginning "Are the prostitutes nothing?" which includes a draft of a line from the third poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, ultimately called "To Think of Time."



Whitman Archive Title: Remembrances I plant American ground
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00029
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 27
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The draft poetic lines in this manuscript includes some language similar to wording in the first and final poems in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "Song of Myself" and "Great are the Myths." On the reverse (duk.00884) is a list of rivers, lakes, and cities that likely contributed to "Poem of Salutation" in the 1856 edition of Leaves.



Whitman Archive Title: Are the prostitutes nothing
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00889
Repository: Duke University: The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana
Repository ID: MS q 11
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript includes a line beginning "Are the prostitutes nothing?" which is a draft of a line from the third poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually titled "To Think of Time." The words "attraction of gravity," included in a crossed-out line in this manuscript, appear in two contexts in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The closest in meaning to its use in this manuscript is in the poem later titled "Great Are the Myths": "It cannot be varied by statutes, any more than love, pride, the attraction of gravity, can" (1855, p. 251). "Great Are the Myths" was ultimately shortened to a few lines and published as "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night" in the 1881 Leaves of Grass. On the reverse (duk.00032) is also an early version of a part of "Great Are the Myths."



Whitman Archive Title: The power by which the
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00029
Repository: New York Public Library: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Date: Before or early in 1855
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: The imagery of this manuscript is echoed in several other manuscripts, as well as in a line of the opening poem of the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass—the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself" (see "you know how" [loc.00142], "I know a rich capitalist" [nyp.00129], and "the crowds naked in the" [nyp.00733]). These relationships suggest that this manuscript dates to early in 1855 or before. Edward Grier has observed that "the writing suggests a date in the 1850s" (see Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:136).



Whitman Archive Title: Silence
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00441
Repository: Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Box: 3
Folder: 140
Date: Between 1850 and 1865
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View images: 1 | 2
Content: This document consists of two manuscript scraps pasted together to make one leaf. Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates the top scrap to the 1860s and the bottom scrap to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:474). The relationship of the first scrap to Whitman's published work is unclear, although Grier notes that "Parsons was a [New York] street preacher who was arrested December 11, 1853 by order of Mayor Jacob Aaron Westervelt (1800–1879) for his incendiary anti-Catholic, anti-foreign speeches. [Whitman], as political journalist, was interested in the resulting 'freedom of speech' controversies. The march referred to took place on December 18" (1:474). Portions of the second scrap are related to "Great Are the Myths," first published, untitled, in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass as the concluding poem, and again in the 1856 edition as "Poem of a Few Greatnesses." These two scraps are largely unrelated: perhaps the only connection between the two is the theme of silence.



Whitman Archive Title: women
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05589
Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman
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: I know a rich capitalist
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00129
Repository: New York Public Library: The Oscar Lion Collection of Walt Whitman
Date: Between about 1854 and 1860
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
Content: Emory Holloway has pointed out that Whitman's reference to the sinking of the San Francisco indicates that this notebook, "or at least part of it, is later than 1853." He writes that "it was probably begun in 1854" because the "marble church" in the first passage presumably refers to the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, "which was not completed until then." See Holloway, "A Whitman Manuscript," American Mercury 3 (December 1924), 475–480. See also Andrew C. Higgins, "Art and Argument: The Rise of Walt Whitman's Rhetorical Poetics, 1838-1855," PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1999; and Edward F. Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:128–135. Of the notebook passages that can be identified with published works, most represent early versions of images and phrases from the 1855 poem eventually titled "Song of Myself." One passage clearly contributed to the 1856 poem later titled "Song of the Open Road." Others are possibly connected to the poems eventually titled "A Song for Occupations" and "Great Are the Myths," both first published in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and to the preface for that volume. One passage seems to have contributed to the 1860–1861 poem that Whitman later titled "Our Old Feuillage." One passage is similar to a line in a long manuscript poem unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures". The first several lines of that poem (not including the line in question) were revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880 and then in Leaves of Grass as part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster (1881–1882, p. 310). No image of the outside back cover of the notebook is available because it has been stitched into a larger volume.


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