The wild gander leads his | Whitman Archive

Whitman Archive Title: The wild gander leads his
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00507
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.
Box: 20
Folder: L of G (1855). Manuscript Page.
Series: Literary File
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content: This manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855, while Whitman was working on the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass . The lines in the manuscript appear in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." John C. Broderick has described this manuscript as the last surviving page of "the original manuscript of the first edition of Leaves of Grass " ("The Greatest Whitman Collector and the Greatest Whitman Collection," The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress , 27.2 [April 1970], 109–128), a claim echoed by Arthur Golden in "The Ending of the 1855 Version of 'Song of Myself,'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review , 3.4 (Spring 1986), 30n6. The page number at the top of the manuscript is not inconsistent with the possible positioning of these lines as part of a printer's copy, but lacking further evidence it would be difficult to confirm the claim. On the reverse side (loc.07428) is a long list of words, many of which are found in the poem eventually "Song of the Broad-Axe."