Live Oak with Moss

In 1953, Fredson Bowers, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, published a study of the Live Oak with Moss manuscripts that reshaped understanding of Whitman. By examining paper type and interpreting Whitman’s Roman numerals, Bowers reassembled from the loose, miscellaneous manuscript leaves a sequence of twelve poems about love for a man, possibly Fred Vaughan, with whom Whitman lived for a time. Whitman never published the sequence in this form.