Content:
A notebook Whitman used for various purposes in the mid-1850s. Edward F.
Grier, in his edition of Whitman's
Notebooks and Unpublished Prose
Manuscripts
(New York: New York University Press, 1984. 6 vols.), noted that the
notebook contains lines and phrases that relate to several poems: "Assurances,"
"This Compost," and
an unfinished poem entitled "The Insects. On some of the leaves Whitman has rotated the notebook and written upside down."