Bloom a machine readable transcription Walt Whitman Kenneth M. Price Ed Folsom Transcription and encoding Robert LaCosse Kirsten Clawson Janel Cayer Kevin McMullen Nicole Gray Kenneth M. Price Brett Barney Ashlyn Stewart Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln University of Iowa The National Endowment for the Humanities 2014 The Walt Whitman Archive
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities 319 Love Library University of Nebraska-Lincoln P.O. Box 884100 Lincoln, NE 68588-4100

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 duk.00294 This leaf consists of two manuscript scraps glued together. The bottom scrap includes notes toward "Song of the Broad-Axe," which was first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass as "Broad-Axe Poem." This suggests a date before 1856. The writing on the top scrap, which describes one of Whitman's acquaintances, might have informed the description of the masculine "saunterer of woods" in that poem. Edward Grier writes of "Bloom" that "It has been suggested that this is Nathaniel Bloom, a member of [Whitman]'s circle of friends in the early 1860s...but it seems more likely that the name refers to either 'Gilbert Bloom, carman,' or 'Gilbert J. Bloom, carman,' as listed in the [New York City] directories for 1854–1855" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:201).

The notes on the bottom half of this scrap probably relate to "Song of the Broad-Axe," a poem which was first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass as "Broad-Axe Poem" before appearing under its final title in 1867. This poem features the transition from the use of the axe by the Old World headsman to the use of it by the New World carpenter that is described in these notes.

 Whitman, Walt Preliminary Studies for Poems 1856 or earlier MS q 32 Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University Transcribed from digital images of the original. updated relations encoding regularized name for infrastructure corrected placement of second pb removed extraneous relatedItem encoding recombined transcription of the two scraps; reconciled with EAD record blessed checked, corrected checked; moved transcription for second "div" (second scrap that forms the recto) to a new xml file (duk.00893) checked; revised repository information in header and values @facs converted from P4 to P5, checked transcribed and encoded

Bloom.—Broad-shouldered, six-footer, with a hare-lip.—Clever fellow, and by no means bad looking.—(George Fitch has room with him a year, and tells me, there is no more honorable man breathing.)—Direct, plain-spoken, natural-hearted, gentle-tempered, but awful when roused—cartman, with a horse, cart &c, of his own—drives for a store in mMaiden lane.—

—The Broad-axe—the axe of the headsman

First as the axe of the headsman—and what was done with it for a thousand years—then as the carpenter's broad-axe, and what is done with that now