Walt Whitman's Journalism

Why edit Whitman's journalism at all? This question is similar to one I am often asked as an historian with an interest in the poet: why Walt Whitman? I suspect literary critics are asked this question less often since Whitman's reputation in US literary history still justifies itself. However, historians are sometimes required to defend the significance of a topic in its context and, frankly, Whitman's journalism, for the most part, was not very important in its context. While there are often discoveries of lost journalism (most recently of Whitman's series "Manly Health and Training," expertly edited and introduced in these pages by Zachary Turpin), the significance of this journalism lies in the retrospective projection of the poet's later reputation onto these sources. One of the reasons that journalistic series like "The Sun-Down Papers" (1840-41), "Letters from a Travelling Bachelor" (1849-1850) and "Manly Health and Training" (1858) remained "lost" for so long is that they were, first, often published pseudonymously or without a byline (which was common during this era) and, second, they were just not that significant to their times, or, frankly, to ours, except as part of Whitman's "long foreground."In his famous letter to Whitman, Emerson compared Leaves of Grass to a sunbeam that forced him to rub his eyes in surprise; the poetry "must have had a long foreground somewhere . . . ." It is this "somewhere" that justifies the publication of the journalism on the Archive. This has so far led to a prescribed method for choosing which writings appear on the Archive, as opposed to the publish-it-all approach of the The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman, begun by New York University Press in 1961, and now continued by Peter Lang Publishers, at least regarding Whitman's journalism. The "long foreground" approach has the benefit of easy justification: Whitman was in the newspaper business for nearly twenty years before Leaves of Grass; all those years of writing, all those thousands of words in newsprint, must include some elements that foreshadow Whitman's sensibility and style. There is as much convenience as there is merit in this argument.Starting with the "Civil War Journalism," the Archive framed Whitman's journalism by an historical event or an early style that ended up in Leaves of Grass or foreshadowed more well-known prose. For example, the Archive first published the "Brooklyniana" series (1861-1862) and Whitman's reports from Civil War Washington for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the New-York Times to give scholars and students access to the poet's first-person prose perspective on events that eventually shaped works like Drum-Taps, Memoranda During the War, and Specimen Days. Starting in 2012, the Archive began to edit four key series of Whitman's pre-Leaves journalism that represented some of his earliest attempts to create a persona in print. Funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities "Scholarly Editions" grant, editors and research assistants transcribed, encoded, and annotated four series-"Sun-Down Papers," "Letters from a Travelling Bachelor," "Letters from Paumanok," and "New York Dissected"-and published them alongside images of complete issues where the editorials appeared. The publication of these editions with images of full issues allows the user to interact with an editorial in its "natural habitat," surrounded by articles of local interest and contemporary color to give some sense of the context in which Whitman's words appeared. These issues, alongside the historical annotations provided with each edition, further illuminate the "foreground" of Whitman's better-known writing. A particularly compelling benefit of these editions is their searchability. Now, users can trace the life of well-known Whitmanisms like "loafer" and "to loafe," which first appeared in 1840 in "Sun-Down Papers," and continued throughout his career, in fiction ("Fortunes of a Country-Boy" from 1846), in verse (Leaves of Grass in 1855), in marginalia (regarding Diderot in 1856), and in letters (to Peter Doyle in 1868, among others), to the end of his life in With Walt Whitman in Camden. …