Goethe | Whitman Archive

Whitman Archive Title: Goethe
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00178
Repository ID: MS q 80
Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
Date: 1856
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 2 leaves, handwritten
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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the essay was not published until later, Edward Grier suggests that the manuscript dates from late 1856 ( Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984] 5:1827).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."