Later in the manuscript he writes of "the buckwheat and its white tops and the bees that hum there all day," and on page 36 of the 1855 Leaves he writes of the "white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and a buzzer there with the rest." Date: Before or early in 1855 
 
 Genre: prose 
 
 Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten 
 
 View images: 1 | 2 
 
 Content: Some of the language in this manuscript is similar to wording in the poem that would eventually be titled "Song of Myself." These lines eventually became section 14 and the beginning of section 15 in the final version of Leaves of Grass. Set in New York, it was serialised in 1852 and written at the same time as the poet began work on his landmark epic poem Leaves of Grass, published three years later. Painstaking detective work led him to a tiny notice from 1852 in the New York Daily Times (now the New York Times) advertising the serialisation in the Sunday Dispatch of an autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle. On the reverse side (duk.00883) are notes, trial lines, and lists of words and phrases related to what eventually became sections 24 and 49 of "Song of Myself" and to lines included in "The Sleepers." The manuscript's likening of "God" or "the soul" to an "Elder Brother" is reminescent of lines "And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own, / And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own." The fragmentary paragraph at the bottom of the leaf seems to be the germ of certain lines of what eventually became "Song of Myself," section 23, first published untitled in Leaves of Grass (1855). On the reverse is a prose manuscript (duk.00879) with an unknown connection to Whitman's published work. These lines were present in the first version of the poem in 1855, suggesting a date of before or early in that year. “Now we see that the fiction and poetry were mingling in ways we never before knew,” he said. These lines are from sections 31 and 32, as numbered in the 1891-92 edition. Several of the words were included in line 14 of the 1855 version of the poem that would eventually be titled "Song of Myself." The lines on the recto are deleted and appear to have been revised to form what is now section 28 of "Song of Myself." The trial lines on the verso (beginning "His very aches are exstasy") seem to have been revised for inclusion in what is now section 29 of "Song of Myself." The image of the musician recruiting attention equally for the problems of all connects these lines with section 18 of "Song of Myself." The "unearthly laugh of the laughing-gull" reappears in what would eventually become line 763 (section 33) of "Song of Myself." The verso contains an early draft of lines eventually incorporated in section 27 of the poem. William White, in his edition of Whitman's Daybooks and Notebooks, 3 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1978), noted a relationship between the material at the beginning of this manuscript and what eventually became section 13, lines 237–243 of "Song of Myself." The lines at the bottom of the back side of the second leaf contributed to what became section 22 of that poem, lines 464–469. Whitman Archive Title: Autobiographical Data 
 
 Whitman Archive ID: loc.05935 
 
 Repository: Library of Congress: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman 
 
 Box: 6 
 
 Folder: Notebooks [before 1855] 
 
 Date: Between 1848 and 1856 
 
 Genre: prose, poetry 
 
 Physical Description: 10 leaves, handwritten 
 
 View images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 
 
 Content: Photostats, made for William L. Finkel sometime "prior to 1942," of a notebook then in the collection but lost during World War II. This one, he says, Whitman used "to develop his cosmology and theory of love" (see Higgins, "Wage Slavery and the Composition of Leaves of Grass: The 'Talbot Wilson' Notebook," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 20, no. 2 [2002]: 74n14). These include two different drafts (one in prose, on surface 11, and one in verse, on surface 14) beginning "Love is the cause of causes." Surfaces 4, 7, and 15 also bear passages that possibly contributed to this poem. 4" (later titled "Our Old Feuillage").
– A University of Houston grad student poking around in the Library of Congress' archives stumbled across a long-lost novel from the mid-19th century—and it's a discovery the editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review tells the Houston Chronicle is "going to change everything we thought we knew" about the American poetry legend his publication is named for. English PhD candidate Zachary Turpin's find: Whitman's Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, originally offered to readers in 1852 as a six-piece series in New York's Sunday Dispatch. The New York Times describes the then-anonymously written 36,000-word piece as a "quasi-Dickensian tale" (which it notes shows hints of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, published in 1855) about an orphan, with a bevy of compelling characters and "more than a few unlikely plot twists and jarring narrative shifts." Turpin, who hit Whitman gold in 2015 when he found a lost Whitman advice series, told the Times last year that his obsession with searching for unattributed Whitman works is "kind of a sickness I have in off-hours." This time around, his quest had him plumbing an archive that contained various Whitman notes, drafts, and other miscellaneous records, per the Guardian. One set of scraps featured a bunch of character names, including "Jack Engle," and when Turpin plugged those names into databases of Victorian-era newspapers, up popped a tiny Times ad for the upcoming Engle serial set to appear in the Dispatch, which Whitman was known to have written for. "I couldn't believe that, for a few minutes, I was the only person on Earth who knew about this book," Turpin says. Read the story at the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. (A husband-and-wife team identified a Whitman poem in 2014.)