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Inventing Walt Whitman

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From: The Virginia Quarterly Review
Date: 20050401
Author:Genoways, Ted

There's a manuscript in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia that I consider the most important single sheet of paper in American literary history. It doesn't look like anything so grandiose. In fact, it looks like little more than a scrap of paper with a few scrawled lines. There are words scratched out here and there in the penciled script, alternate words tried out, question marks inserted over uncertain choices, but the words could hardly be more significant:

The spotted hawk salutes the approaching night;

He swoops by me, and rebukes me ...

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