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Whitman strives to create a distinctive poetry suited for an American national tradition: a modern epic

Other American authors had written about democracy before, but they did not imbibe the democratic spirit

devoted a long essay to democracy, Democratic Vistas (1871), which deals with the shortcomings of American

Campion, the editors of Walt Whitman: the Measure of His Song (1998), have shown that almost every American

Some poets, like Ezra Pound or Allen Ginsberg, were more explicit than others such as T.S. Eliot.

keenly interested in the new developments in textual scholarship and the new digital archives that were

manuscripts; I was then located relatively near Charlottesville; and leading people in humanities computing were

because, after issuing the CD-ROM, the publisher proceeded to move Whitman material online, and we were

because they didn't actually own the material they had printed in book form: that is, all the reviews were

The Classroom Electric: Dickinson, Whitman, and American Culture , ed. Kenneth M.

PSM has asked us to initiate their American Literature Major Authors series with a CD-ROM of Whitman,

Whitman, having worked as a printer and editor, was unusual among American Renaissance writers in not

For instance, throughout his career, nineteenth-century reviewers were united in finding the essence

Talks are in progress with two additional high schools in Iowa City, IA. What does each member do?

From Georgetown University's American Studies Crossroads Project

for his celebration of ordinary people, and for his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass , which redefined American

Despite Whitman's centrality in American culture, his manuscripts have been little studied, and the poetry

Beginning in his teenage years, Whitman's manuscripts were scattered widely when documents were sent

dipping into the sea of paper that surrounded him, a seemingly endless source of manuscripts that were

digital form, and the ones that were in digital form were not necessarily encoded following current archival

I would like to begin by briefly telling a long story, an all too familiar one, a story of American literary

There were more and more universities, and more and more graduate students, and more and more professors

that the nature of scholarship itself changed to accommodate a suddenly swollen mass of scholars, who were

Still, it is the standard edition, the edition cited by American literary scholarship over the past few

So much of the labor of book-editions of were devoted to the process of turning materials—manuscripts

Between the 1860 publication of the third edition of and the publication of the fourth edition six-and-a-half

It seems, then, that one effect of these various encoding choices we've inherited—even though they were

Intimate with Walt: Selections from Walt Whitman's Conversations with Horace Traubel, 1888-1892 (Iowa City

Whitman's correspondence, arranged chronologically, contains an "Addenda," and two supplemental volumes were

The many materials that were not included in the are now housed in numerous and scattered archives, and

The problem we're describing is one of separated cultures: the divisions of labor that were acceptable

multiple repositories offer possibilities (both for public presentation and for scholarship) that were

and some types of research—for example, comparing drafts and establishing the history of composition—were

Whitman looked to the Americans whirring around him for inspiration, perceiving "a teeming nation of

Whitman's conviction that America and its citizens were poems in and of themselves echoed the zeitgeist

During this American Renaissance, as it came to be known, authors and philosophers such as Hawthorne,

" in the book's first poem, there were no other clues to his identity.

The third edition of , released in 1860, was the first released by a publisher.

The Walt Whitman Archive was the first hit in both searches; also highly-rated were the Library of Congress's

We began to build what we were then calling the Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive (we later dropped the

There were also problems with the navigation of the site.

There were some important consequences from this undertaking.

These volumes were originally contributed to the by Ed Whitley.

Whitman's Dispersed Poetry Manuscripts Kenneth Price, the Hillegass Professor of American literature

Existing images were gathered, permissions secured, and fees paid.

The poems were often not given the same title, and some were left untitled.

Transcriptions were encoded with Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).

Manuscript images were 24-bit color TIFF images with a minimum resolution of 600 dpi.

The collection started with a first edition soon after Semans and Trent were married and were living

"In those days, things like that were fairly reasonable," Semans said.

American Literary History 16.1 (2004): 85–92. McGann, Jerome.

wander around Cambridge, which still had many secondhand bookstores, and sometimes travel to other cities

It seemed almost providential, as if we were destined to come together.

with an impressive documentary Web site called " The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American

"The World of Dante," "The Vivarium Digital Library of Latin Literature," "Uncle Tom's Cabin and American

He was the most photographed American author of the 19th century, but no publisher is likely to support

Every week, the invasion of generic products took over a larger segment of American grocery stores.

Category had prevailed; the borders were secured.

and performing typographical experiments that forced readers to engage the printed page in ways they were

" but never once mentioning poetry as the thing that made him rub his eyes "to see if this sunbeam were

how to sell his book, and one thing he needed to do was make it clear to consumers just what they were

But when we prepared to tag the text of the first edition, we were confronted with the jarring typographical

And since in the 1860 edition Whitman includes a cluster of twenty-four numbered poems called "Leaves

interpretive narratives about them, using bits of the data to construct a meaning that is always exceeded

The archive already includes six American editions of Leaves of Grass , as well as the "deathbed" printing

Project co-director Kenneth Price, a professor of American literature at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln

These letters provide context for poems drafted at the time, many of which were inspired by wounded soldiers

and it includes transcriptions (whole text and individual poems) and facsimiles of the six major American

Price's edited collection, Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews , along with several reviews that were

Cohen of Duke University, will be fully searchable and will include facsimiles of the ephemera that were

Nebraska, is developing a section that includes about fifty interviews with Whitman, most of which were

Iowa City: Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, 2005. Folsom, Ed. and Kenneth M. Price. .

With regard to book design, a wide range of options were available, but these choices customarily were

; the rest were unedited.

She further notes that nowhere is the adjective American more secure than when it is offered as American

American literature is a self-evident field, as American physics and American biology are not.

American Fiction, 1851–1875: A Contribution Toward a Bibliography .

In fact, there were extended periods when we were convinced that such an approach would not be possible

In the case of Whitman, we might want to study him as a city poet.

erected to house the city’s swelling population, which tripled during the four years of the War.

Washington was a noisy city during these years: the noise in the city was of construction as work on

Even as bridges were defended and a ring of forts made this space the most heavily defended city on earth

(among them were Whitman, Lincoln, the naturalist John Burroughs and the remarkable African American

erected to house the city's swelling population.

of determining those areas of the city where African Americans built some of their own institutions,

While bridges were defended and a ring of forts encircled the city, Washington fostered vibrant life.

What portions of the city were disproportionately affected by disease and crime?

For Aaron, American writers failed to produce texts that were commensurate with the magnitude of the

, Randall Fuller, and a host of others have analyzed writings, particularly by women and African Americans

Generous support from the American Council of Learned Societies has helped me—along with Ed Folsom and

issued after the war was over and were shaped by the nation’s internal struggle.

His efforts, as numerous soldiers testified, were extraordinary and in some cases life-saving.

project, Civil War Washington (civilwardc.org), attempting to illuminate certain key aspects of the city's

concentrated on the development of forts, the growth of hospitals, and the changing nature of the population

We have not studied other potentially illuminating aspects of the city's history—crime statistics, foreign

to document, just as it is often hard to find much detail about many nineteenth-century African Americans

A North American Bird Phenology Program, for example, is transcribing ninety years of records with the

Were they, as the name "citizen" implies, ordinary members of the public (as was the case in Transcribe

In the time since these comments were made we have been more engaged with social media both through a

National Archives, were inscribed (if not authored) by Whitman when he worked in the Attorney General's

discovery at the earliest possible time, and thus we made the documents available even before they were