Documents transcribed by Whitman discovered
Baku, April 16 (AZERTAC). A University of Nebraska-Lincoln scholar`s recent discovery of federal documents penned by Walt Whitman may shed new light on the poet`s post-Civil War work.
The documents were unveiled by the National Archives on Tuesday in a Washington, D.C., event marking the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Sumter - the start of the American Civil War.
UNL professor Kenneth Price, a nationally recognized Whitman scholar, spent two years leafing through the national archives looking for documents in Whitman`s handwriting. Eventually, he found almost 3,000 pages.
"I had a hunch there might be three, four, maybe five documents still there," he said, recalling the day in 2008 that he found the first paper.
"I looked through hundreds of pages without finding anything and was starting to get bleary-eyed. Then, there it was, a page entirely in Whitman`s handwriting. Then a few others. Then a whole string of them, all in Whitman`s hand."
The documents were not actually authored by Whitman, who worked as a scribe for the U.S. attorney general from 1865 to 1873. In the era before typewriters and copy machines, Whitman`s job was to hand copy letters written by federal officials to create an official record of correspondence. The letters were stored in massive, 900-page bound letter books at an archives site in College Park, Md.
Price believes Whitman`s clerical work shaped much of his writing, particularly "Democratic Vistas," his 1871 analysis of American democracy, arguably his greatest prose work.
"This was an age of high hopes but also big problems, and Walt Whitman was there in the thick of it," said Price, who is UNL`s Hillegass University Professor of American Literature. "He was not a passive observer; he was participating, on a daily basis, in issues that were shaping what the nation would be like after the war."
Another renowned Whitman scholar, Ed Folsom of the University of Iowa, described Price`s discovery as "a stunning find."
Folsom, Iowa`s Carver Professor of English, co-edits an online archive of Whitman material with Price. The Whitman letters will be published there, with about 2,000 pages to be publicly available by September.
For years, Folsom said, scholars had suspected such documents might be buried in government archives, but no one had found them. No one expected the wealth of information Price turned up.
The discovery will "revolutionize our understanding of Whitman during the explosive Reconstruction years, since we will be able to track, on a virtually daily basis, just what social and political issues he was thinking about and working on," Folsom said.
Price, who earned his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago, has studied Whitman for 30 years. He said he became captivated by Whitman`s life of public service as much as his poetry.
Although he was not officially a nurse, Whitman visited thousands of wounded soldiers during the Civil War. Several credited him with saving their lives.
Whitman often wrote letters home on behalf of soldiers, which Price described as another instance where Whitman`s own work was influenced by assuming the personas of others.
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