America to the Old World Bards

Whitman Archive Title: America to the Old World Bards
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04599
Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Library of Congress
Box: 3
Folder: Notebook pages
Series: Notebooks
Date: 1870-1891
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
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Content: A manuscript containing poetic lines that eventually led to the poem "Old Chants," first published in the New York publication Truth on 19 March 1891 and was later reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891). "Nat Bloom," the name that appears on the recto of the third leaf, was a New York City acquaintance of Whitman from as late as the 1870s, according to Edward Grier ( Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984] 4: 1405). If that is true, then this constitutes a very early draft of "Old Chants".