Holograph literary fragments and notes for poems

Abstract

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.

Dates / Origin

Date created: 1855

Library locations

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

Shelf locator: Berg Coll + Whitman, Walt Holograph literary fragments