Much of the work of the Whitman Archive is currently focused on editing of his poetry manuscripts, crucial documents that have never before been systematically collected, transcribed, and presented. We have chosen to define "poetry manuscript" broadly, since it is often hard to determine the boundary between prose and verse in Whitman's manuscripts—especially in the pre-war years, Whitman habitually migrated his writing from prose to verse. For the purposes of this project, we consider as a poetry manuscript any writing in Whitman's hand that either is written as verse, contains a key image or language that eventually made its way into a recognized Whitman poem, or discusses the making of a poem. We are adding new content on a regular basis, so please check back to get the most recent updates. Users of the Whitman Archive familiar with our earlier work on manuscripts can still access that material by clicking here.
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