Exhibition Curator George Riser with Whitman’s Personal Bible

Whitman’s personal Bible, this 1870 Oxford University Press edition, was in his possession from 1887 to his death in 1892. Critic Gay Wilson Allen has documented over two hundred biblical references and allusions scattered throughout Whitman’s work, proving the work’s importance as a frequent source of inspiration. “The Bible as Poetry” appears as an essay in November Boughs, and in A Backward Glance O’re Travel’d Roads, Whitman writes of  inspiration gleaned from the Old and New Testaments.