Content:
Whitman's copy of John G. C. Brainard's
Occasional
Pieces of Poetry
(1825), many pages of which bear the poet's
handwriting. Whitman appears to have used the volume as a notebook of
sorts, for while some of the writing seems to be related to Brainard's
text most of it does not. Among the handwritten notes are several sets
of ideas for poems that were never published and phrases that also
appear in Whitman's personal correspondence. Some of these are phrases
that Whitman inscribed in the copy of
Complete
Poems & Prose
(1888) that he gave to Horace
Traubel. On other pages are words from his letter to Anne Gilchrist of
November 11,
1871. These were perhaps copied into the Brainard volume as
he worked to write a poem in Gilchrist's honor, though they did not make
it into "Going Somewhere," the poetic
tribute that Whitman published in the November
1887 issue of
Lippincott's
Magazine
(without individual title, but in a group of four
poems collectively labelled "November
Boughs"). A draft of "Going
Somewhere" appears elsewhere in this volume. Also
present is a draft of "The Dismantled
Ship," which was first published in the
New York Herald
on February 23,
1888. Both poems were later included in
November Boughs
(1888) and in
subsequent printings of
Leaves of Grass.
Only those pages with Whitman's handwritten notes are linked from this
record. For a more complete discussion of this item, see Nicole Gray,
"Walt Whitman's Marginalia as Occasional
Practice,"
The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of
America
107 (December 2013),
467–494.
Content:
A draft of "The Dismantled
Ship," first published in 1888, written on
the inside of an opened envelope (postmark date unclear). At the bottom
of the page in a note in Whitman's hand: "probably printed in Herald
19th Feb.
'88."