An online guide to Walt Whitman's dispersed manuscripts
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07378830410560071 |
| Date | 01 September 2004 |
| Published date | 01 September 2004 |
| Pages | 277-282 |
| Author | Katherine L. Walter,Kenneth M. Price |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
An online guide to
Walt Whitman’s
dispersed manuscripts
Katherine L. Walter and
Kenneth M. Price
The authors
Katherine L. Walter and Kenneth M. Price are based at the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, USA.
Keywords
Digital libraries, Archives
Abstract
In November 2002, with funding from the Institute of Museum
and Library Services, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the
University of Virginia embarked on a project to create a unified
finding aid to Walt Whitman manuscript collections held in many
different institutions. By working collaboratively, the project
team is developing a finding aid that is tailored to the needs of
Whitman scholars while following a standard developed in the
archival community, encoded archival description (EAD). XSLT
stylesheets are used to harvest information from various
repositories’ finding aids and to create an integrated finding aid
with links back to the original versions. Digital images of poetry
manuscripts and descriptive information contribute to an
ambitious thematic research collection. The authors describe the
National Leadership Grant project, identify key technical issues
being addressed, and discuss collaborative aspects of the
project.
Electronic access
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is
available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is
available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0737-8831.htm
Introduction
Walt Whitman (1819-1892), a highly influential
poet and one of the most innovative writers in the
US history, is famous for his inclusive vision of
democracy, for his celebration of ordinary people,
and masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, which redefined
American literature. Despite Whitman’s centrality
in American culture, his manuscripts have been
little studied, and the poetry manuscripts, in
particular, have never been collected and edited.
Beginning in his teenage years, Whitman’s
manuscripts were scattered widely when
documents were sent to friends and left with
newspaper publishers. As a correspondent, he did
not routinely keep copies of letters. Visitors to his
house in Camden, New Jersey, often described
Whitman dipping into the sea of paper that
surrounded him, a seemingly endless source of
manuscripts that were divided among three literary
executors after his death. Many of the papers left
with the literary executors were dispersed at
auction and then further dispersed at subsequent
sales. From an archival perspective, it is impossible
to determine an original order for the entire corpus
of Whitman manuscripts. The chaos of Whitman’s
papers was a point borne home to the project
archivists by the fact that Whitman’s manuscripts
are now scattered in over 60 different institutional
repositories, and poetry manuscripts have been
located in 29 repositories. Because the materials
are widely dispersed and irregularly documented,
scholars or general readers interested in the
development of Whitman’s poetry – through
multiple drafts to finished work – cannot locate
and examine the relevant documents without great
expense of time and money.
Whitman scholarship is complicated also by the
fact that the poet only occasionally titled his
manuscripts, and when he did, he often used a title
different from that employed in any of the six
distinct editions of Leaves of Grass. Furthermore,
Whitman’s drafts of ideas for his poems, his first
treatment of key images, and his initial
explorations of rhythmic utterances sometimes
began as prose jottings that were gradually
transformed into verse. For example, in the case of
his great elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman jotted down
bare lists of words that provided a kind of
chromosomal code for the fully realized poem.
Thus, for a number of reasons it is difficult to
correctly identify and categorize Whitman’s
manuscripts.
Library Hi Tech
Volume 22 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp.277–282
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0737-8831
DOI 10.1108/07378830410560071
Received: 5 February 2004
Revised: 26 April 2004
Accepted: 12 June 2004
277
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