Instructive, recurring back

Whitman Archive Title: Instructive, recurring back
Whitman Archive ID: loc.06084
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: OV 11
Folder: 1888, "Elias Hicks"
Series: Oversize
Date: about 1888
Genre: prose
Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
View Images: 1 | 2
Content: This manuscript about the life of George Fox, written in ink with some corrections in pencil, appears to be a draft introduction for the section headed "George Fox (and Shakspere)" in the essay "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks." This essay was first published in November Boughs (1888) and later reprinted in Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman abandoned the approach to his topic that is suggested in the first paragraph of the manuscript, but the paragraph indicated by the pointing hand, at the bottom of the manuscript, contains the kernel of a key paragraph in the published version. Whitman planned to write an essay about Elias Hicks for many years. While finishing preparations for the printing of November Boughs, Whitman told Horace Traubel, "Some of these bits were written as many as thirty years ago. Some of them I have written within the past year. They are a miscellaneous lot but they all belong in the same stream." (See Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 2: 42.) The present manuscript is stored together with many other manuscripts on the topics of Elias Hicks and Quakerism. Those that directly contributed to the published essay are described separately. Those whose relationship to the published essay are unclear are not included at this stage of our work.