Walt Whitman's Annotations

FAIN: PW-253797-17

University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Lincoln, NE 68503-2427)
Matt Cohen (Project Director: July 2016 to March 2021)

The addition of 1,400 new documents, updates to the database of Whitman’s reading, and creation of curated theme portals for the Walt Whitman Archive.

America's most famous poet, Walt Whitman, left behind an unusual and extraordinary collection of marginalia and annotations. This hitherto uncollected and largely unpublished set of extraordinarily diverse and sophisticated documents shows America's most famous poet in-the-making. With NEH support, we published 800 pages of these documents in 2015, and for the first time, by way of the freely accessible Walt Whitman Archive, students, scholars, and casual readers are now able to explore Whitman's self-education, through his reactions to the literature, history, science, theology, and art of his time. Having achieved our goals for that grant, we now apply for NEH funding to preserve and give free public electronic access to more of Walt Whitman's manuscript annotations. We apply for two years of implementation funding to publish 1400 more pages of documents, update our database of Whitman's reading, and create curated thematic subsections to draw more attention to the project.

Associated Products

Whitman's Cultural Geography Scrapbook (Web Resource)
Title: Whitman's Cultural Geography Scrapbook
Author: Matt Cohen
Author: Caterina Bernardini
Author: Kevin McMullen
Author: Ashlyn Stewart
Author: Caitlin Henry
Abstract: In the years following the publication of the first and second editions of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman began compiling a scrapbook. It's unclear what purpose he had in creating the massive document, comprised of portions of textbooks, magazines, newspaper clippings, and manuscript notes—more than 1,000 individual text surfaces in total—all relating, in some way, to world history and geography. Whitman in these years was both searching for ways to extend the vision he had laid out in the first two editions of Leaves, and also working and drafting in a variety of other genres. What we do know is that, in the late 1850s, as the nation appeared more and more in danger of fracturing, Whitman created a document that, between two hardbound covers, brought the whole world together, a laborious and sprawling act of union—and a document that contained the seeds of several works that found their way into print in the following years, including a number of poems in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Although scholars have been aware of this scrapbook, it has received scant attention, in part because it is housed in a relatively small collection of Whitman materials (the Bayley / Whitman Collection at Ohio Wesleyan University), and in part because of the daunting size of the artifact itself. With the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the assistance of Special Collections staff at Ohio Wesleyan University Libraries, the Walt Whitman Archive has digitized the scrapbook in its current state. Our transcription includes all material relevant to the scrapbook's theme and surfaces marked by Whitman; we have omitted transcriptions of unrelated printed verso material and printed text formatting such as italics and underlining, and have included in brackets descriptions of charts, tables, and figures for ease of searching.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/marginalia/index-scrapbook.html
Primary URL Description: Whitman Archive Website

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