WHITMAN, Walt.

£57,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

"O brood continental", autograph manuscript poem. A working manuscript, with three corrections, from the poet's early maturity, composed during the American Civil War and unpublished in his lifetime. Here, Whitman's expansive faith in the American experiment is shadowed by the gathering crisis over slavery, and his voice turns urgent and prophetic.Written in his characteristic apostrophic mode, the poem opens in a series of invocations - at once exultant and alarmed - calling a restless nation to attention as signs of an approaching storm accumulate:O brood continental!O you teeming cities! invincible, turbulent, proud!O men of passion & the storm! O all you slumberers!Arouse! Arouse! the dawn-bird's throat sounds shrill!Arouse! as I walk'd the beach, I heard the mournful notes foreboding a tempest!The poem was first published in Walt Whitman's Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts (1928), edited by Clifton Joseph Furness, who speculated that the draft was "later incorporated in 'Apostroph'; first published in the 1860 edition [of Leaves of Grass] but dropped thereafter, perhaps because Whitman did not care to retain souvenirs of the unhappy period which it commemorates. Yet even in the published form it lost its distinct and poignant reference to the impending conflict over slavery" (p. 227). However, Arthur Golden suggests the manuscript is strongly associated with the revisions Whitman made in his own copy of the 1860 third edition of Leaves of Grass, and writt

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