The regular old followers | Whitman Archive

Whitman Archive Title: The regular old followers
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00024
Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Library of Congress
Box: 2
Folder: Notebooks c. 1854–1855
Series: Notebooks
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 See Edward Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:113–117. Lines in this manuscript correspond to a line from the manuscript poem, unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, titled "Pictures": "And now a merry recruiter passes, with fife and drum, seeking who will join his troop."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).