The catalogs presented here detail and provide access to Walt Whitman's literary manuscripts, held in more than fifty repositories around the world. With these catalogs we do not aspire to represent the totality of any one repository's Whitman-related holdings or to offer a finding aid for a complete collection. We aim to create an overarching guide to a virtual collection of Whitman’s manuscripts organized around the concept of Whitman’s "works" (known as the "Integrated Catalog" and explained below) and thereby to provide an unprecedented documentation of and access to the literary manuscripts of a major literary figure. To form the Integrated Catalog, we create individual catalogs for each repository, which are then combined to form the Integrated Catalog according to this overarching principle. Our mark-up is fully compliant with EAD (Encoded Archival Description), the nonproprietary de facto standard for the encoding of finding aids.
These catalogs deal only with items Whitman Archive staff have deemed poetry and/or prose manuscripts. In their current form, these resources represent a near-complete catalog of Whitman's poetry manuscripts. Because of the sheer volume of manuscripts that could be categorized as "prose" (in effect, any item handwritten by Whitman that was not poetry, correspondence, or marginalia) we initially limited our item-level descriptions of prose material to only those items that could be identified, with reasonable confidence, as having contributed to a piece of published prose. As part of a project treating Whitman's writings before the publication of Leaves of Grass, we have since added item-level descriptions of all prose manuscripts which we believe were written before or early in 1855. We intend to eventually include item-level descriptions for all prose manuscripts.
The Integrated Catalog is organized alphabetically by uniform work title and chronologically by composition date within each work. We define a "work" as the abstract idea of an individual piece of writing (poem, prose section, prose essay, etc.). We derive the uniform work title from the final published title used by Whitman during his lifetime. In most cases this is the title assigned in the final printing of Leaves of Grass (1891–92) or Complete Prose Works (1892). It should be noted, however, that some poems and prose pieces were published in earlier volumes but were not retained in these final volumes. Thus, for example, a poem that appeared in the 1860, 1867, and 1872 editions of Leaves of Grass but then was dropped from future printings would take as its uniform work title that which Whitman gave to it in the 1872 edition. If we are unable to determine a particular manuscript's relationship to a published work, we consider it a work unto itself and assign a uniform work title based on the first words appearing on the manuscript.
In the Integrated Catalog, uniform work titles are displayed in large font, with individual items related to each work described in detail below them. The grouping of individual manuscripts by work is intended both for the navigational ease of the site's users (since users are most familiar with Whitman’s final titles) as well as to reflect the complex nature of Whitman's composition and revision methods, in which a single manuscript may contain bits of text that eventually found their way into several different works. Thus, a manuscript may appear multiple times in the Integrated Catalog, listed separately under each work to which it contributed. Each item-level entry provides a title, date, genre, repository location information, physical characteristics, and a description of the textual content of the item. Access to an image of the original item is also provided whenever possible.
The individual catalogs are organized alphabetically by the title assigned to each item by the Whitman Archive.