Walt Whitman’s Working Manuscript of O brood continental Leads Peter Harrington Poetry Catalogue

A working manuscript of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poem, working drafts of Dylan Thomas's work, and a cache of Leonard Cohen’s early poetry feature in Peter Harrington's new catalogue Poetry: The Heart of the Matter.

Highlights include:

• Walt Whitman’s working manuscript of O brood continental, an unpublished Civil War-era poem with three corrections in Whitman’s hand, capturing his response to the gathering crisis over slavery (£57,500)
• Dylan Thomas’s three manuscript drafts of To Others Than You, rare survivors of Thomas’s chaotic creative process since the poet habitually burned his working drafts once a poem was complete (£30,000)
• Rupert Brooke’s manuscript of The Fish written across two postcards to his lover Katharine Cox during the month of composition - the only other known manuscript copies are held at King’s College, Cambridge (£37,500)
• seven original typescript poems by Leonard Cohen (five unpublished poems and two early versions of later works) given to a university friend (£30,000)
• Frances Cornford’s archive of 74 manuscript poems, a collection of early and unpublished poetry assembled by her first champion William Rothenstein and later owned by Siegfried Sassoon (£37,500)
• Vita Sackville-West’s pre-publication manuscript of Sissinghurst, a corrected draft showing hermaking final revisions to one of her best-known poems, discovered tucked inside a first edition of her Collected Poems (£15,000)
• Ezra Pound’s unpublished O weep for Buck Possum, a rare manuscript poem playfully lampooning T. S. Eliot over the demise of The Criterion (£17,500)
• Robert Frost’s signed manuscript of The Need of Being Versed in Country Things with a variant line written out and struck through (£30,000)
• W. H. Auden’s signed typescript of Moon Landing – Sent to a close friend just five days before publication in The New Yorker, and preserved in the family until recently (£9,750)

Items from Poetry: The Heart of the Matter are available online, with select highlights on display at Peter Harrington’s galleries in London and New York. The catalogue has been co-curated by Sammy Jay, Senior Literary Specialist at Peter Harrington, and cataloguers Callum Hill and Mark Pickett.