Holograph manuscript fragments written on scraps of paper of various sizes, affixed to blank leaves and bound into three cloth-covered, leather-spine volumes. These fragments were assembled by Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke (1837-1902), the Canadian physician and "alienist" who was a friend of Whitman's, as well as his first biographer and one of his three literary executors. While transcriptions of thirty-nine of these fragments were published in Bucke's Notes and Fragments: Left by Walt Whitman and Now Edited by Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke ... ([London, Ontario, Canada, A. Talbot], 1899), twenty-three of the fragments contain emendations in Whitman's hand, and these do not appear in Bucke's transcriptions. The fragments include passages of Whitman's poetry, aphorisms and observations of his own composition, miscellaneous notes and jottings, including ideas for new poems, word lists, definitions, and quotations from other writers.
Content: A collection of 47 scraps of paper bearing approximately 55 different verses and notes by Walt Whitman, in pen and pencil. One slip also bears a newspaper clipping, with Whitman's notes on the side. Tipped into 3 volumes bound (ca. 1920) by Sangorski & Sutcliffe of London, England, each volume bearing calligraphic title in red and black. At least seventeen of the slips bear text on recto and verso; of these, twelve have been removed and rehinged on the original bound leaves, the others are tipped in on at least two sides and remain illegible or partly legible.
