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Whitman Archive Title: (Of the great poet)
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Whitman Archive ID: duk.00128
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Repository ID: MS q 69
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Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
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Date: About 1855
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Genre: prose, poetry
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Physical Description: 3 leaves, handwritten
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Content:
This manuscript includes notes that anticipate the preface to the first (1855) edition of
Leaves of Grass
. Images and phrases in the second paragraph of the first leaf are reminscent of lines in both the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself" and the poem eventually titled "I Sing the Body Electric." Another line on the first leaf appeared in a slightly different form in "Poem of The Singers, and of The Words of Poems" in the 1856 edition of
Leaves
(a poem later titled "Song of the Answerer"). The stated desire for "satisfiers" and "lovers" (found here on the bottom of the second leaf) appears in "Poem of Many in One," also first published in the 1856 edition and later titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore."
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