Call Number:

F0892

Repository:

University of Delaware Library Special Collections

Extent:

1 item (2 pages)

Language:

English

Preferred Citation:

MSS 0099, F0892, Walt Whitman manuscript, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware.

Date:

circa 1870-1892 (inclusive)

Creator:

Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892

Form:

Manuscripts (documents) and Poems

Abstract:

This collection consists of an undated, untitled holograph Walt Whitman poem, later published, posthumously, as "186" and "187" in Notes and Fragments (1899).

American poet Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, New York, and died of illness on March 26, 1892, in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman is best known for his collection of poetry,

Leaves of Grass, which was first published in 1855. Whitman continued to revise and rework his Leaves of Grass for the remainder of his life, ultimately producing nine different editions, each featuring further revisions, new poems, and some deletions of earlier poems. In 1881, Whitman settled on the final arrangement of Leaves of Grass and subsequently made no further revisions to the core text. All new poems written after 1881 were added to Leaves of Grass as annexes to the 1881 edition; the final authorial edition of his poems, the so-called "death-bed" edition, appeared in 1892, shortly before his demise.

"Walt Whitman." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC (accessed March 2011). Whitman, Walt. Notes and Fragments. Ed. Richard Maurice Bucke. London, Ontario, Canada: Printed for the Editor by A. Talbot & Co., 1899.

This collection consists of an undated, untitled holograph Walt Whitman poem, later published, posthumously, as "186" and "187" in

Notes and Fragments (1899).

The poem is inscribed in Whitman's hand on a remaindered piece of ruled Department of Justice stationery. It consists of two passages or fragments which were later published posthumously in the 1899

Notes and Fragments. The passages were published as "first drafts and rejected lines and passages, mostly very fragmentary, from 'Leaves of Grass,' largely antecedent to the 1855 edition" by the book's editor, Richard Maurice Bucke, who had received the manuscripts in his capacity as one of Whitman's literary executors. The passages are not titled in the manuscript; Bucke identified them as "186" and "187". "186" is inscribed on the recto of the leaf, with some additional corrections by Whitman (first line: "The same old mystery and problem"). "187" is inscribed on the verso of the leaf, with some additional corrections by Whitman (first line: "The true, new world, the world of science, mind and literature"). The corrected states of the manuscript are textually identical to the poems as published in Notes. It is unclear from the manuscript whether the two passages were intended by Whitman to be individual entities or parts of the same poem. The manuscript itself is not dated; the stationery on which it is written has the year "187[ ]" printed on it, with a blank space in which the last digit of the year would have been filled in by hand; therefore, the manuscript cannot have been composed any earlier than 1870.