Marginalia and Annotations

Walt Whitman was an extensive reader, and like many of us, he kept notes—in the margins, on scraps of paper, and in notebooks—about his reading. This section of the Archive offers a collection of such documents written and drawn upon by America's most famous poet.

Other resources related to Whitman's reading and note-taking are linked in the "Further Resources" section on this page.

A special section of the marginalia material is dedicated to Whitman's cultural geography scrapbook. Both the scrapbook and the marginalia documents in general present a heterogeneous collection of materials and topics, and users may wonder where to start in exploring these items. We have therefore created a series of curated exhibits that highlight prevalant themes and potential research topics in these materials. These can also be found in the "Further Resources" section on this page.

From classical rhetoric to the poetry of Tennyson, from Persian mysticism to nineteenth-century phrenological journals, the influences on Whitman's work were historically deep and culturally diverse. With support from the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program at the National Endowment for the Humanities, we have catalogued and begun to make freely available in digital form documents with significant annotations that are identifiably in Whitman's hand. We have focused on Whitman's notes that comment on other writers' works, whether "annotations" (i.e. notes entirely in manuscript) or "marginalia" (i.e. manuscript notes in the margins of a printed text by another author, such as a book or clipping from a periodical). Drafts leading to Whitman's original compositions, whether poetry or prose, are treated in other sections of the Archive.

The documents are grouped according to whether they are annotations or marginalia. In most cases, the only pages transcribed are those that include notes in Whitman's hand. In the case of documents listed as marginalia, the title reflects the title of the base document, where possible. When this information is not known, the title of the document is based on the first several words of Whitman's notes on the page. All annotations document titles are based on the first several words on the page. Where we use colors in the display to represent textual features like writing in Whitman's hand or pasted-on text, we provide a color key in the document metadata. Because Whitman at times made marks on running heads and other common print features, we have preserved them in our transcriptions in this section of the Archive. Since it can be difficult to determine whether Whitman was responsible for underlining or bracketing, we have described such marks as "highlighting." For further discussion of editorial decisions related to the marginalia and annotations, see our statement of editorial policy.

In this index we have included "not before" and "not after" dates to give a general estimate of when the marginalia or annotations were written. Since most of Whitman's marginalia and annotations are undated, this range is often necessarily speculative. For further specificity and explanation of the date associated with any marginalia or annotations, see the dates and editorial notes in the metadata sections at the top of the individual transcription files. To sort the index list, use the "Sort By" drop-down.