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.

The heart of the exhibition is dedicated to Whitman’s magnum opus, Leaves of Grass. Ten exhibition cases highlight, in chronological order, every edition of Leaves of Grass published during the poet’s lifetime.  Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in July, 1855. 

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.