Walt Whitman manuscript

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.