Introduction to Walt Whitman's "Manly Health and Training"

NOTWITHSTANDING NEARLY EVERYTHING he ever said in poetry, Walt Whitman could be surprisingly anxious about his own disappearance. "Some day I'll die," he reminded his friend and literary executor Horace Traubel, "maybe surprise you all by a sudden disappearance: then where'll my book be? That's the one thing that excites me: most authors have the same dread-the dread that something or other essential that they have written may somehow become side-tracked, lost-lost forever."1 As it turned out, much of his writing was indeed lost, despite his talent for self-bibliography and the efforts of generations of scholars to sort through Whitman's mountains of personal papers. He simply wrote too much. Some of his texts were bound to sink from sight-with Whitman occasionally trying to scuttle them himself, anxieties be damned. His early short stories, for example, embarrassed him dreadfully: "My serious wish," he confessed in Specimen Days and Collect (1882), "were to have all those crude and boyish pieces quietly dropp'd in oblivion." In the end, Whitman collected a few of them merely "to avoid the annoyance of their surreptitious issue."2 Other early writings were less persistently annoying, and thus less fortunate. Whitman's mid-life journalism and freelance writings were particularly unfortunate in this regard. Published shortly after the inception of Leaves of Grass (from 1855 to 1860 or so), usually anonymously or under pen names, much of this work fell into almost total obscurity immediately after the poet's "sudden disappearance." It has so far required more than a century and a half of work, with Whitman's own encouragement-"Missing me one place search another"-to recover his mid-life prose publications.3 The earliest such "find" of which I am aware is Whitman's anonymous "New York Dissected" series (1856). It was forgotten for eighty years in the pages of Fowler and Wells' Life Illustrated magazine until Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari uncovered it in 1936.4 Another notable discovery was Whitman's "Paumanok" correspondence, a wide-ranging trio of letters to the editor of the Washington, D.C., National Era (1850), finally republished by Rollo G. Silver in 1948.5 Then there is the complete series of Whitman's "Letters from a Travelling Bachelor," which appeared in the New York Sunday Dispatch in 1849-1850 before disappearing from memory, until Joseph J. Rubin rediscovered and published them in 1973.6 The list goes on and on.7 All told, scholars have easily rediscovered more than one hundred thousand words of Whitmanian journalism, to which vague figure I am happy to add a further forty-seven thousand in the form of "Manly Health and Training" (1858), Whitman's forgotten, book-length guide to living healthily in America.During his lifetime, the poet seems to have wasted no time reminding anyone of this series, nor any of the others listed above-and, given Whitman's horror of disappearance, we might ask why. It is possible that Whitman simply forgot about his articles, though I doubt it. Perhaps it is because these recovered works tend toward the editorial, interesting as often as not for how un-Whitmanian, even unpoetic, they can be.8 Or perhaps they did not, in Whitman's estimate, dovetail properly with the political scope or poetic philosophy of Leaves of Grass. Both "New York Dissected" and "Letters from a Travelling Bachelor," for instance, are geographically narrower, addressed to one specific region rather than a "teeming nation of nations."9 And tonally, the "Paumanok" letters are too overtly aggressive and political, favoring, as the "Dissected" series does, the topical over the eternal. "Manly Health and Training" is a similarly square peg. Though every bit as concrete and optimistic as Leaves, the "Manly Health" series' function is fundamentally utilitarian, a physiological and political document rooted in the (pseudo)sciences of the era. These fields, phrenology and eugenics especially, inspired a surprising amount of Whitman's poetic and political thought, as scholars such as Harold Aspiz and M. …