Kenneth Price is one of many Walt Whitman scholars dedicated to tracking every jot and tittle left by the definitive poet of America. Three years ago, Mr. Price came upon a startling discovery, buried in the National Archives: Whitman’s handwriting and his signature initials on documents he copied during his Washington day job as a government clerk.
“A prodigious amount of material,” said Mr. Price, who is at about 3,000 documents and searching for more. They give the lie to tales of Whitman’s being a slacker of a bureaucrat when he hand-duplicated the letters and memos of government officials.
For some, the material may be frustrating for offering no new tropes and stanzas from Whitman the poet. Still, his clean penmanship, so easily read in the here and now, is something fresh to wonder about — Whitman working to keep food on the table while he wrote his great Civil War poems. In his free time, he wrote letters home for wounded and illiterate Civil War soldiers. Twelve in one day “inhabiting the voice of another,” notes Mr. Price, a literature professor at the University of Nebraska and co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive.
Whitman clearly was no passive observer who could compartmentalize his life, which makes it interesting to see what biographers will make of this emerging clerk’s tale. The papers he copied dealt with the bureaucratic mundane but also issues like the Ku Klux Klan; the trial of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president; and westward railroad expansion. He worked at the Army paymaster’s office, the attorney general’s office and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where the poet was famously fired after his boss pronounced “Leaves of Grass” immoral writing.
No comments:
Post a Comment