Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

McMullen, Kevin

WWQR VOL. 33 NO. 2 (FALL 2015)
125
NEW ON THE WALT WHITMAN ARCHIVE
THE INTEGRATED CATALOG OF WALT WHITMAN’S 
LITERARY MANUSCRIPTS
NEARLY TEN YEARS ago the Whitman Archive created the “Inte-
grated Guide to Walt Whitman’s Poetry Manuscripts,” a resource 
that provided access to nearly all of these items, pulling together 
manuscripts spread across more than thirty repositories and offer-
ing item-level descriptions and scanned images of each. Using EAD 
(Encoded Archival Description), the nonproprietary de facto standard 
for the encoding of finding aids, the Archive project created individual 
catalogs for all of these repositories, describing the Whitman poetry 
manuscripts held in each. The individual manuscript descriptions 
were also combined to form the Integrated Guide, a resource that 
for the first time provided access to all of Whitman’s poetry manu-
scripts in one virtual collection. This guide was organized around the 
concept of Whitman’s “works,” allowing users to see all of the known 
manuscripts that contributed to a given poem.1 For this project, the 
Walt Whitman Archive was awarded the Society of American Archi-
vists’ C.F.W. Coker Award, for setting national standards in archival 
description, in 2006.
 Now, the Whitman Archive is proud to unveil a greatly expanded 
version of this resource: the “Integrated Catalog of Walt Whitman’s 
Literary Manuscripts.” This new iteration, funded by the National 
Endowment for the Humanities, has added descriptions and images 
of more than 500 prose manuscripts, providing unprecedented access 
to early versions of Whitman’s writings and shedding light on the 
creative process behind Whitman’s prose. These additions bring the 
total number of manuscripts described in the Integrated Catalog to 
nearly 1,500. Each item-level entry provides a title, composition date, 
genre, repository location information, physical characteristics, and a 
description of the textual content of the item. Access to images of the 
original manuscript is provided whenever possible.
 As an initial stage of the prose project, Whitman Archive staff 
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members compiled a list of all of Whitman’s known prose manuscripts. 
A given manuscript can be associated with any number of works, and 
thus may appear multiple times in the Integrated Catalog, listed sepa-
rately under each work to which it contributed. We compiled the list 
by consulting Edward F. Grier’s six-volume Notebooks and Unpublished 
Prose Manuscripts and William White’s Daybooks and Notebooks (both 
published by New York University Press as part of The Collected Writings 
of Walt Whitman). To this we added those prose manuscripts, several 
hundred of which were unaccounted for in these print volumes, for 
which the Whitman Archive had acquired images and records during 
the past two decades. Finally, using ArchiveGrid, an online database 
that aggregates the records of more than 1,000 archival institutions, 
we sought out any remaining Whitman prose manuscripts. Totaling 
close to 2,000 items, this list represents the first attempt to document 
the scale of Whitman’s extant prose output in manuscript form. 
The project’s initial goal was to then write item-level EAD descrip-
tions for all of Whitman’s prose manuscripts, as we had done for the 
poetry. However, it soon became clear that such a goal was unrealistic 
given the sheer volume of prose manuscripts, their overall complexity, 
and the amount of time required first to determine a given manuscript’s 
relationship to Whitman’s larger body of published work and then 
to write the EAD description itself. We thus decided to confine our 
item-level descriptions only to those items that could, with reasonable 
confidence, be identified as having contributed to a piece of published 
prose. Of course, we hope to someday have the resources to include 
item-level descriptions for all 2,000 prose manuscripts. The addition 
of the prose material also necessitated the creation of individual manu-
script catalogs for approximately twenty new repositories, meaning 
that the Archive’s Integrated Catalog now brings together manuscripts 
that are spread across more than fifty repositories around the world. 
In the process of establishing standards for the research and 
description of the prose material we began noticing small but signifi-
cant shortcomings in our earlier work with Whitman’s poetry—brief or 
ambiguous descriptions, missing image links, overly-broad or missing 
composition dates, or missing information about the first publication 
of a given work. Thus, this prose project also offered an opportunity to 
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return to the earlier poetry EAD entries, expanding shorter descrip-
tions, supplying missing information, and highlighting connections 
to published work that were missed in the project’s first instantiation.
The Archive’s new Integrated Catalog contains manuscripts from 
as early as the 1840s right up until the final year of Whitman’s life, 
and, like the earlier Integrated Guide, is organized by work, with all 
of the drafts that contributed to that work grouped together. A given 
manuscript can be associated with any number of works (and thus
may appear multiple times in the Integrated Catalog, listed separately 
under each work to which it contributed). This method has at least 
two advantages: it organizes the material under titles that users are 
most likely to know, and it allows us to represent the complex nature 
of Whitman’s composition and revision methods, in which a single 
manuscript may contain bits of text that eventually found their way 
into several different publications.
 For example, the Thomas Biggs Harned Collection at the Library 
of Congress holds a Civil-War-era notebook that Whitman used in 
1862 and 1863 in both New York and Washington, D.C. Alongside 
draft material for the poems “A Noiseless, Patient Spider,” “The City 
Dead House,” and “The Artilleryman’s Vision” are prose jottings that 
later appeared in various newspaper articles published over a two-year 
period, some of which were still later incorporated into Memoranda 
During the War and Specimen Days. Our method allows us to repre-
sent this notebook’s complexity in the Integrated Catalog by having it 
appear in the sections devoted to each of the ten published pieces to 
which it contributed.  
 While our efforts thus far with these manuscripts have focused 
mainly on access and contextualization rather than interpretation and 
analysis, we nevertheless made several minor new discoveries about 
Whitman’s prose during the course of the project. For example, two 
manuscripts held at the Huntington Library contain Whitman’s hand-
written notes about his family’s Dutch heritage. Large chunks of the 
text from these manuscripts were used nearly verbatim in an article 
entitled “Dutch Traits of Walt Whitman,” which was published under 
William Sloane Kennedy’s name in In Re Walt Whitman (1893), a 
volume of articles by and about Whitman published posthumously 
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by the poet’s literary executors. Whitman seems to have written the 
lines, referring to himself in the third person, and then sent them to 
Kennedy around 1886, to help Kennedy with a book project on which 
he was working at the time. Kennedy held on to the manuscripts 
for several years and then tried to pass the text off as his own after 
Whitman’s death. Additionally, our research uncovered twenty-six 
individual manuscripts that fed into Whitman’s essay “Notes (such as 
they are) founded on Elias Hicks,” first published in November Boughs
in 1888. So much material all contributing to a single work allows for 
an interesting examination of Whitman’s composition process. One 
manuscript, in particular, consisting mainly of names, dates, and short, 
jotted descriptions, some of which later appeared in “Elias Hicks,” 
highlights the seamless way that Whitman’s reading and note-taking 
developed into literary productions. While these are but two rela-
tively minor examples, we are confident that access to this rich trove 
of manuscript material will facilitate countless new discoveries and 
research opportunities. 
The changing of the resource’s name from the “Integrated Guide” 
(as it has been known since 2006) to the “Integrated Catalog” stemmed 
from our desire to more accurately describe the function of the resource 
as we see it. While a “Guide” implies that there is a proper direction 
from which to approach the materials, and perhaps even a proper 
destination at which to eventually arrive, a “Catalog” suggests a more 
inclusive, less directed listing of materials. “Catalog” has the additional 
benefit of its Whitmanian connotation, suggesting the poet’s famous 
poetic catalogs of people, sights, sounds, and events. And while the 
Integrated Catalog exists now only in a static state organized by work, 
we hope soon to make the Catalog fully sortable and searchable, allow-
ing users to arrange their viewing of manuscripts based on a number 
of factors, such as a particular genre or a desired timespan. We also 
plan to link to transcriptions of the manuscripts when we have them 
available, making the Integrated Catalog the main entry point on the 
Walt Whitman Archive for those seeking to explore Whitman’s manu-
scripts.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln       KEVIN McMULLEN
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NOTES
1    We define a “work” as the abstract idea of an individual piece of writing 
(poem, essay, newspaper article, etc.), and derive the title for each work from the 
final published title used by Whitman during his lifetime.


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