Whitman’s Notebooks Missing For More Than Half A Century, The Material Reveals Much About Great American Poet

The nurse recorded in his notebook each wounded soldier’s simple request, for an orange, a piece of horehound candy or to have a book read to him, and the nurse obliged as he could.

He noted his patients’ names and addresses, and for those who could not write, he wrote letters to their families. By the name of each who died, he drew a cross.

The chronicler was Walt Whitman. The notes, taken while he worked as a nurse in a Union Army hospital in Washington during the Civil War, are part of the contents of four notebooks of Whitman’s that turned up recently at Sotheby’s after more than half a century missing and presumed stolen.

The notebooks span the years from 1847, when Whitman was a 28-year-old journalist, still eight years away from the publication of the seminal collection “Leaves of Grass,” to 1863, at the height of the Civil War, when he had become the country’s most acclaimed poet.

The four pocket-sized books, filled with penciled scribblings and crossed-out words, not only comprise a diary of sorts, but also contain snippets of some of the works for which he would later become heralded as one of America’s greatest poets.

“I realized immediately that these were incredibly important literary manuscripts, and also important for their biographical data,” said Selby Kiffer, vice president of Sotheby’s and an expert in books and manuscripts, who first saw the notebooks last month.

“What struck me almost more than the poetical excerpts were the hospital notebooks. They strongly reinforce the image we have of Whitman as a profoundly humane person.”

Such an intimate look into the thoughts and development of an artist are “virtually unique” for Whitman’s period, Kiffer said.

The material is not entirely new to students of Whitman, though their disappearance robbed researchers of an important window into the poet’s life and art for more than 50 years.

The books were among 10 slender volumes of Whitman’s notes that one of his executors, Thomas Harned, gave to the Library of Congress in 1918, said Jill Brett, a spokeswoman for the library. They were used by Whitman scholars for more than two decades, the last recorded time in 1941, but were never completely transcribed or photographed, she said.

“There is new ground there for biographical research,” Kiffer said. “We now, for instance, in the hospital notebooks know the names and addresses of scores of families Whitman wrote to. Maybe now some of those letters can now be tracked.”

The notebooks, along with many other valuable items in the library’s collections, were boxed up and shipped to various sites for safekeeping in 1942, after the United States had entered World War II.

The box that was supposed to contain the notebooks returned to Washington a few years later with its seal intact but without the books, indicating that they had been taken in 1941 or 1942, Brett said. Six of those notebooks are still missing.

The four books that were brought to Sotheby’s will be returned to the library, the auction house said.

The 1847 notebook, written while Whitman was editor of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, contains an early version of “Song of Myself,” which appeared in the first edition of “Leaves of Grass” in 1855.

Another notebook, Kiffer said, probably dates from the 1850s, a time when, in addition to journalism, Whitman’s pursuits included running a stationery store and speculating in real estate.

And two volumes were filled during the Civil War, when Whitman, in his 40s, his fame well established, worked as a volunteer nurse in an Army hospital. In those pages is an embryonic stage of “Cavalry Crossing a Ford,” one of his bestknown wartime poems.

One aspect of Whitman’s career that the books make clear is his concern for his reputation. At every stage, he notes whom he has met and whether the new acquaintance knows and likes his work.

“Whitman was always a self-promoter,” said Nicholas Loprete, a Whitman scholar and professor at Fordham University who said that he had not seen the papers but that they could prove significant.

“He wrote anonymous reviews of his own work and planted them with newspapers across the country.”

In one of the notebooks was a paper cutout of a butterfly, believed to be the same butterfly perched on the poet’s hand in a photograph of him taken in the 1870s, Kiffer said.

The picture, which appeared in many editions of “Leaves of Grass,” was long thought to show a real butterfly, and was seen as symbolic of Whitman’s image of being in tune with nature.

The discovery of the butterfly, Kiffer said, betrays a degree of calculation in the poet’s calculation of that image.

The four notebooks were brought to Sotheby’s last month by a man who was interested in selling them and wanted an appraisal of their value, said Matthew Weigman, a spokesman for the auction house.

The man, whose identity Sotheby’s would not reveal, was too young to have been involved in the theft, and said he had found the books among the things his father had left him on his death, Weigman said.

The FBI investigated the disappearance of the books after World War II. Brett said the Library of Congress had asked the bureau to reopen the case.