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Whitman Archive Title: Drift Sands.
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Whitman Archive ID: loc.04183
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Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Library of Congress
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Box: 1
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Folder: "Drift Sands"
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Series: Manuscripts
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Date: about 1888
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Genre: prose, poetry, correspondence
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Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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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.
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