Walt Whitman

The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman - Volume Vi Annotated edition

All these letters had been preserved by Mrs. Whitman and upon her death in 1873 passed to Walt Whitman, who, a very sick man at the time and for long afterwards, simply let them lie in old boxes and bundles until, at his death, they passed to the present editor. Quite a number of books from Whitmans library, many of them annotated by the poet. A great mass of the bulk of which is printed in this volume-a good deal of the rest is of an autobiographical character and is reserved for a new edition of my Walt Whitman or to be used in publications supplemental editor preface to that volume. The magazine articles and news- paper cuttings enumerated in Part VI. of this volume. Each of the other two literary executors took under the poets will the same amount of material as my- self, so it will be seen that these remains were quite extensive, and judging by the careless, hap-hazard manner of their preservation it would seem certain that more must have been lost than were left in existence at the time of the poets death. These facts and considerations when we join to them others equally well known and obvious, as that he knew the Bible, Shakespeare, and Homer almost by heart bring out pretty clearly the extraordinary industry of this man, who has generally been considered as easy-going, careless, idle, even a loafer, but who must have been in fact, though almost in secret, one of the most indefatigable workers who ever lived even in America...