A Visit to the Opera | Whitman Archive

Whitman Archive Title: A Visit to the Opera
Whitman Archive ID: hun.00038
Repository ID: HM 1191
Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
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discussion of this draft's relation to "The Opera" and to several other manuscripts, see Edward Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984) 1:388-397.