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Whitman Archive Title: In his presence
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Whitman Archive ID: loc.00483
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Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839-1919, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
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Series: Notes and Notebooks
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Date: Between 1850 and 1855
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Genre: prose, poetry
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Physical Description: 14 leaves, handwritten
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Content:
Whitman probably inscribed the material in this notebook in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of
Leaves of Grass
. Some of Whitman's language about the poet and religion in this notebook is similar to the language and ideas used in the preface to the 1855 edition of
Leaves of Grass
. Content from leaf 10 verso (see twentieth image) was revised and used in "The Sleepers," the poem eventually titled "The Sleepers," which first appeared in
Leaves of Grass
(1855), including the following lines: "Now the vast dusk bulk that is the whale's bulk . . . . it seems mine, / Warily, sportsman! though I lie so sleepy and sluggish, my tap is death" (1855, p. 74). The passage likely also relates to the following lines in the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself": "How the flukes splash! / How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!" (1855, p. 48). Content from leaf 13 recto (see twenty-fifth image) may relate to other sections of the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself."
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