Whitman, Walt | "I must show perfect blood, the great heroic gentleman"

Whitman, Walt

Two autograph manuscripts, including of "Roaming in Thought (after reading Hegel)" [with] Whitman's copy of a book review

Autograph manuscript of Walt Whitman's "Roaming in Thought (after reading Hegel)". Two pages on one leaf (132 x 216 mm), written verso and recto. The poem on verso, in black ink, followed by a note, a letter written on recto, in purple ink; stray spots, three marginal pinholes, tape to recto, old folds. [With]: Autograph manuscript note. One page (61 x 117 mm), a note in pencil in Whitman's hand with a hand-drawn printer's fist; chip to left margin, stray spots, old folds, tape to right corner, piece of stamp to recto. [With]: Whitman's copy of an unsigned review of Matthew Arnold's The Strayed Reveller, which appeared in the September, 1849 issue of Blackwood's Magazine. Eight pages (227 x 134 mm) on four leaves, "Strayed Reveller" in pencil in Whitman's hand on first page, two paragraphs of a previous article crossed out, a letter to the New York Daily Times from December 1855 pasted to first page; some staining, tear at bottom corners, wear at edges.

A group of writings in Walt Whitman's script

"Roaming in Thought (after reading Hegel)" is followed by a note to the recipient, "read proof very carefully | by copy | follow punctuation & each capitalization"; the recto features a letter sent to Whitman requesting his autograph. 

The second autograph manuscript, likely written around the time the author composed Leaves of Grass, states, "I want something to offset the overlarge element of muscle in my poems—it must be counterpoised by something to show I can make perfect poems of the graceful, the sweet, the gentle, the tender, the perfect—I must show perfect blood, the great heroic gentleman" with the words "the perfect" crossed out.

The poet W.E. Aytoun authored the unsigned review of The Strayed Reveller. That Whitman kept a review of The Strayed Reveller may be notable due to the book's surface-level similarity with Whitman's own Leaves of Grass. Arnold's book was published semi-anonymously, under the name "A.", and the title poem is an unrhymed lyric written in irregular meter.

A wonderful collection of writings showcasing Whitman's ambition, attention, and reading life

REFERENCE

Grier, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts: Volume I: Family Notes and Autobiography, 386; Blackwood's Magazine, September 1849; Hickman, "A New Direction for 'The Strayed Reveller'," Victorian Poetry, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Summer, 1983); Academy of American Poets; Villa, Doveglion: Collected Poems, ed. John Edwin Cowen

PROVENANCE

Poet, writer, and artist José García Villa. Villa was born in Manila in 1908, before moving to New Mexico to pursue his studies, and ultimately to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined a community of modernist poets, including e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, among others, and was affectionately known as "The Pope of Greenwich Village." He wrote his poems under the pseudonym Doveglion (a composite of dove, eagle, and lion) and was admired, according to Marianne Moore, for "the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems." His 1933 story collection, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, was "the first work of fiction by a Filipino writer published by a major United States-based press."

He received “numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Philippines Heritage Award, a Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a Shelley Memorial Award. In 1973 he was named a National Artist of the Philippines, and he also served as a cultural advisor to the Philippine government. He died in New York City on February 7, 1997.”