Skip to main content

Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library, Amherst College

Original records created by Amherst College; revised and expanded by the Walt Whitman Archive and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. Encoded Archival Description completed with the assistance of the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the University of Nebraska Research Council, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.




Individual items at this repository

  • Whitman Archive Title: to enjoy the Panorama
  • Whitman Archive ID: amh.00008
  • Date: about 1850
  • Genre: prose
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: 1 | 2
  • Content: The handwriting on this draft fragment indicates that it was written fairly early, probably before the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855. Most of the fragment describes a moving panorama, a popular form of entertainment during the antebellum period. The juxtaposition Whitman sets up in this manuscript (of painted panorama to actual landscape) appears in a line published in the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass , from the poem that would later be titled "Song of Myself": "The panorama of the sea . . . . but the sea itself?"

  • Whitman Archive Title: Walt Whitman's Caution
  • Whitman Archive ID: amh.00009
  • Date: between 1856 and 1860
  • Genre: poetry
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: 1 | 2
  • Content: This is a draft of "Walt Whitman's Caution", a poem first appearing as one of the "Messenger Leaves" in Leaves of Grass (1860). The title of the poem was changed to "To the States" in the 1881–1882 edition of Leaves .

  • Whitman Archive Title: Of Ownership
  • Whitman Archive ID: amh.00006
  • Date: about 1860
  • Genre: poetry
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: 1 | 2
  • Content: This manuscript was probably composed in the late 1850s or in 1860 as Whitman was preparing the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass . It is a draft of No. 4 of the "Thoughts" cluster published first in the 1860 edition. In later editions, Whitman dispersed the individual lines, presenting them as separate poems or incorporating them into newly created poems. In the 1871–1872 Leaves of Grass , the first line appeared as the initial line of "Thoughts [Of ownership]." In the 1881–1882 edition, the second line returned as "Thought [Of Equality];" and the third and fourth lines were titled "Thought [Of Justice]."

  • Whitman Archive Title: It is in itself
  • Whitman Archive ID: amh.00002
  • Date: about 1873
  • Genre: poetry
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: 1 | 2
  • Content: This is an early draft, with revisions, of the paragraph that introduced "Prayer of Columbus" when it was first published in the March 1874 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine and then in Two Rivulets (1876). Later printings of the poem deleted the introduction.

  • Whitman Archive Title: Drum-Taps
  • Whitman Archive ID: amh.00004
  • Date: between 1865-1892
  • Genre: poetry
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: 1 | 2
  • Content: This note indicates the proper location for the Drum-Taps poems in the page sequence of what was apparently a manuscript or some other pre-publication form of Whitman's poems. Whitman first used the title Drum-Taps for a volume of poems published in 1865. The title was also applied to a cluster of poems within later editions of Leaves of Grass.

  • Whitman Archive Title: 'Probably the largest Known animal'
  • Whitman Archive ID: amh.00005
  • Date: 1872–1892
  • Genre: poetry
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: 1 | 2
  • Content: These notes by Whitman, beginning "probably the largest known animal," concern a "rorqual," a "razorback" or "finback" whale. The relationship of these notes to Whitman's published work is unknown.

  • Whitman Archive Title: In forming the book
  • Whitman Archive ID: amh.00014
  • Date: undated; between 1873 and 1889
  • Genre: prose
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: 1 | 2
  • Content: On one side of the leaf is a heavily revised prose fragment in which Whitman claims that his literary project has been to craft poetry which, rather than exemplifying conventional notions of poetic form, offers a faithful record of the writer's life and milieu. The relationship of this draft to any one of Whitman's published works is uncertain, though it resembles passages in several, including "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" (1888) and "Note at End of Complete Poems and Prose" (1888). The other side of the leaf contains the last page of a letter to Whitman from James Matlack Scovel.

  • Whitman Archive Title: Fancies at Navesink
  • Whitman Archive ID: amh.00003
  • Date: May 1885
  • Genre: poetry
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten; printed
  • View Images: 1
  • Content: This is a galley proof of four poems from "Fancies of Navesink," a group of eight poems first published in The Nineteenth Century in August 1885: ""The Pilot in the Mist,"" ""Had I the Choice,"" ""You Tides With Ceaseless Swell,"" and ""Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning."" Signed, dated, and heavily annotated by Whitman.

  • Whitman Archive Title: Army Hospitals and Cases
  • Whitman Archive ID: amh.00010
  • Date: 1888
  • Genre: prose
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: 1 | 2
  • Content: The first page of a fair copy draft of "Army Hospitals and Cases," an essay first published in the October 1888 issue of The Century magazine.

  • Whitman Archive Title: National Literature
  • Whitman Archive ID: amh.00017
  • Date: 1890 or 1891
  • Genre: prose
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: 1 | 2
  • Content: The first page of a draft essay that was published in the March 1891 issue of The North American Review under the title "Have We a National Literature?" It was later reprinted in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891), under the title "American National Literature" before finally appearing in Complete Prose Works (1892). Whitman's extensive revisions are done in ink and several different colors of pencil, and the two scraps of paper that constitute this manuscript leaf were pasted together by the author to create a single inscribed surface. The whole has been affixed, probably by Horace Traubel, one of Whitman's literary executors, to a backing sheet made of letterhead stationery from the office of "The Artsman." Traubel's note on the backing sheet's lower right corner is dated 1907 and indicates that he presented this item to William Gable.

View All Works
Back to top