One of the difficulties facing the serious critic of American literature is the unpredictability of the primary source materials on which textual and literary investigation must depend. These materials, especially the precious manuscripts, are widely scattered and so frequently preserved, uncatalogued and unknown, in the hands of private collectors, that any scholar who needs to follow their traces must keep an active card file of auction records and purchases. Surprises, though not an everyday occurrence, may always be expected.

One afternoon early in the September of 1951, the noted collector of American literature, C. Waller Barrett, spread before my eyes the contents of a thick leather case packed full with autograph manuscripts by Walt Whitman. It seemed incredible that these manuscripts of about eighty poems could have existed so many years after Whitman's death without scholarly notice or curiosity save in one small instance. That they did so, and that these literary riches are now available for critical use in an edition, is the sole excuse for concerning myself here with a subject so far removed from my ordinary experience. It was an honour to have been invited to edit these manuscripts; and despite its inevitable drudgery the experience itself was fascinating. Not only did these papers represent the largest group of Whitman's poetic manuscripts in existence, all but one of them unreproduced, but they offered the opportunity for literary detective work at various levels of criticism that was of the highest interest to attempt.