Journalism annotation corrected

In the third footnote of Whitman's April 12, 1842, editorial in the New York Aurora, we had noted that Whitman was "likely referring to" two state senators from New York. We have removed the word "likely" from the footnote, as Whitman is definitely referring to those two senators.

- Kevin

Piece of Civil War journalism added

We have added a transcription and images of "City Photographs—No. VII," a piece of Civil War-era journalism that Whitman published in the New York Leader in 1862. When the Whitman Archive edited Whitman's Civil War journalism a number of years ago we were unable to obtain images of the issue in which this installment appeared. We have since received images, courtesy of the New-York Historical Society. The piece is the final installment of Whitman's "City Photographs" series, which appeared in the Leader from March–May 1862. It has been transcribed, encoded, and annotated.

- Kevin

Typo corrected on "Sleepers" page in Resources

Stephanie Browner pointed out that our transcription of the "Sweet Flag" manuscript on this page showed "wiht" for "with." I have corrected this error.

~ Brett

Typo corrected in 1881-1882 and 1891-1892 Leaves of Grass

User Kelly Franklin alerted us to the absence of a space between the words "presses" and "upon" in our transcription of "The Artilleryman's Vision" in the 1891-1892 Leaves of Grass. Upon investigating, I found the same error in the 1881-1882 edition. I have corrected both transcriptions.

~ Brett

EAD entries for items from the University at Buffalo added

We have written EAD catalog entries for the two prose manuscripts held in the Rare & Special Books Collection in the University Libraries at the University at Buffalo. As with our other EAD entires, the electronic catalog records contain metadata about the manuscripts, images of them, as well as brief descriptions of the manuscripts' contents. The records can be found either in the individual catalog for the University at Buffalo or in the Integrated Guide to Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts.

- Kevin

EAD entry for loc.00026 updated

The EAD entry for an 1862 notebook has been updated to reflect a new discovery. Item loc.00026 had previously been described as being connected to a Whitman-authored journalistic piece based solely on the reference to a German beer garden that Whitman mentions. As the Archive did not have access to the journalistic piece in question, this assertion was made based on a description of the piece found in Edgar Lee Masters' book, Whitman, where Masters mentions that the article contains a "long paragraph on Lindmuller's dance hall" ([New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1968], 118). However, the Whitman Archive recently received images of the journalism piece in question—the seventh installment of Whitman's "City Photographs" series—and upon transcribing and encoding the article found that two pages of the 1862 notebook were actually drafts of a portion of the article (the section titled "Lindmuller's"). The EAD entry for loc.00026 has been changed to reflect this. The transcription of the "City Photographs" piece is awaiting further proofing and is not yet live on the site.

- Kevin

Additional encyclopedia entries now available

392 additional entries from Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998) are now available on the Whitman Archive encyclopedia index page, bringing the total number of available entries to 565. Thanks to Alexander Ashland, Regan Chasek, Sara Duke, Said Fallaha, Caitlin Henry, and Jeannette Schollaert for their work to get these entries published on the Archive.

~ Nikki

Titles of several Aurora editorials corrected

In order to bring them in line with our editorial policy for titles elsewhere on the Archive, we have edited the titles of several editorials that Whitman wrote for the New York Aurora. The titles altered were for the editorials with the following WWA IDs: per.00378, per.00382, per.00388, per.00392, per.00395, and per.00399.

- Kevin

Announcement about Aurora material added to News page

I have added an announcement about the publication of the New York Aurora editorials to the Archive's "News and Updates" page.

- Kevin

Corrections made to Staff Page

Blake Bronson-Bartlett and Ian Faith have rejoined the project staff and had been included in the current staff list, but they were also still included in the list of "past project staff." I have removed their names from the "past staff" section.

- Kevin

Added link to downloads page

I have updated the downloads page to include a link to our newly public Git repositories, which allow users to download up-to-date TEI/XML files associated with six sections of the Whitman Archive: correspondence, manuscripts, marginalia and annotations, notebooks, reviews, and scribal documents.

~ Nikki

Corrections to 1855 Leaves of Grass

I have made a series of corrections to the punctuation, spacing, and capitalization of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. These changes include:

• Capitalized title text on title page
• Removed extraneous comma from copyright statement
• Changed period to comma at the end of “The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,” (p. 17)
• Removed space from “near by” at the top of p. 19
• Added comma to end of “The western turkey-shooting draws old and young . . . . some lean on their rifles,” (p. 22)
• Adjusted (mis)spelling of “adobe” to “abode” to match image on p. 23
• Changed period to comma at the end of “Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you,” (p. 30)
• Adjusted the location of the line break in line that begins “Hands I have taken” (p. 30)
• Adjusted the location of the line break in line that begins “I hear the bravuras of birds” (p. 31)
• Removed extraneous comma in line “But I know it is sure and alive and sufficient” (p. 49)
• Adjusted (mis)spelling of “and” to “aud” to match image on p. 58
• Adjusted the location of the line break in line that begins “The old forever new things” (p. 61)
• Adjusted the location of the line break in line that begins “The designs for wallpapers” (p. 63)
• Added missing line break to the line that begins “And liquor is spilled on lips” (p. 72)
• Added missing line break to the line that begins “It is dark here underground” (p. 72)
• Changed semi-colon to colon at the end of the line beginning “I love the rich running day” (p. 77)
• Adjusted the location of the line break in line that begins “He was a frequent gunner and fisher” (p. 79)
• Changed period to exclamation point in line that begins “Those are really men!” (p. 83)
• Changed comma to period at the end of the line that begins “They shall get a grant” (p. 89)
• Changed period to comma at the end of the line that begins “They rule on the highest” (p. 95)
• Added missing line breaks to the following pages: pp. 17, 18, 20, 25, 29, 30, 31, 33, 38, 40, 41, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 56, 59, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 89, 91, 92, 94

~ Nikki

Staff page updated

Caterina sent an updated biographical sketch for the staff page, and I took the opportunity to update my own.

~ Brett

Addendum: me, too!  ~ Nikki

Institutional affiliations of advisory board members updated

I have updated the staff page with current affiliation information for Edward L. Ayers and John Unsworth.

~Brett

New periodical and journalism material added

New material has been added to the Archive's "Periodicals" section. We have added transcriptions of 39 editorials likely authored by Whitman as editor of the New York Aurora. In order to draw a distinction between Whitman's role as a newspaper writer and his role as a newspaper editor, we have created a new "Newspaper editing" section, in which we offer page images of full issues of papers for which Whitman served as editor. Currently, we offer images of the Aurora and link to the Brooklyn Public Library's images of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. We have also updated the main "Periodicals" index page to reflect these new additions. Along with the Aurora material, we have added a new introduction to Whitman and the Aurora, written for the Archive by Jason Stacy.

- Kevin

5 books of criticism added

I have added the following books from the Iowa Whitman Series: Martin Buinicki's Walt Whitman's Reconstruction, Betsy Erkkila's Walt Whitman's Songs of Male Intimacy and Love, Christine Gerhardt's A Place for Humanity, Joanna Levin & Edward Whitley's Whitman among the Bohemians, and Ivy Wilson's Whitman Noir.

~ Brett

Contact info updated on Poem in Periodicals index page

The contact information at the bottom of the Poems in Periodicals page has been updated, to reflect that Kevin McMullen, not Susan Belasco and Elizabeth Lorang, is now overseeing that section of the Archive.

- Kevin

Images added to several pieces of correspondence

We received images from Bolton Central Library (Bolton, England) of several pieces of Whitman's correspondence. We had previously had transcriptions of the letters live on the Archive site, with the text derived from Edwin Haviland Miller's Correspondence volumes. We have now added images of the letters to the transcriptions, checking the text against the images. The metadata has been updated accordingly. The letters were bol.00001, bol.00002, and bol.00003. A letter from a private collector was also missing an image, which we have now received and linked to (prc.00112).

- Kevin

Correction of section heading in "This Compost"

Ed Folsom noticed that the first section of "This Compost" was erroneously headed "2"; I have made the correction.

~ Brett

Updated fiction bibliography

I have updated Stephanie Blalock's bibliography of publications and reprints of Walt Whitman's fiction with her latest finds, bringing the total number of publications and reprints listed to 464.  I have also updated the associated map.

~ Nikki

"Teaching" sub-section removed from "Resources"

It was decided at Whitman camp to remove this sub-section, since only one syllabus remained (and that now very old). The other link from the teaching page, to the Classroom Electric project, has been added to the "Links" subsection. In place of "Teaching" on the homepage of the Archive I have added "Links."

~ Brett

Footnote edited in periodical poem

Ellie Tipton, the managing editor of Poet Lore, emailed the Archive, alerting us to a reprinting of Whitman's poem "When the Full-Grown Poet Came" on the cover of the 1891 issue of Poet Lore (Vol. III). We have edited the footnote to our transcription of the poem's original periodical printing, noting its reprinting in Poet Lore.

- Kevin

Minor corrections to Complete Prose Works

I spotted and corrected the following two minor errors in the transcription of Complete Prose Works: In the table of contents, elipses between "Steam-Power, Telegraphs, &c." and "America's Back-Bone"  were missing; near the top of p. 144 was an extraneous apostrophe after the word "ten."

~ Brett

Published transcription of Whitman's periodical poem "The House of Friends"

A transcription of Whitman's 1850 poem "The House of Friends" has been added to the Archive's "Poems First Published in Periodicals" section. The poem had been listed as having first appeared in a periodical, but the Archive had been unable to obtain an image of the issue of the New York Daily Tribune in which it appeared, thus no image or transcription was available. We have now obtained a digital image of a microfilm copy of the issue, allowing us to transcribe and annotate the poem. A link to the transcription has also been added to the index of individual periodical poems, as well as the index that appears on the page dedicated to the New York Daily Tribune.

- Kevin

Newly discovered review published

We have published a newly discovered review of Whitman's poem "After All, Not to Create Only." The review appeared in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin on November 11, 1871. Whitman had first published the poem concurrently in the New York Commercial Advertiser and the New York Evening Post on September 7, 1871; the poem was then published in a stand-alone volume by Roberts Brothers in Boston in late 1871. It is this bound volume that is being reviewed by the Bulletin.

- Kevin

Typos corrected in "Letters from a Traveling Bachelor"

Jason Stacy pointed out two errors in annotations for the "Letters from a Traveling Bachelor" journalistic series. In note 8 for the installment of 4 November 1849, Charles S. Watrous was incorrectly identified as "Charles S. Waltrous." And in note 7 for the installment of 25 November 1849, the Dutch artist Ary Schefler was incorrectly identified as "Ary Scheffer." Both errors have been corrected.

- Kevin

Traubel volumes updated to TEI P5

We have updated the Archive versions of Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden (9 vols.) to the most recent (P5) version of TEI.  In the course of this update, we made various adjustments to eliminate extra space in the display and we added date ranges to the table of contents.  We have also corrected some typos. 

~ Nikki

Minor correction to Leaves of Grass (1855)

Kelley Franklin noticed that a linegroup break was missing from our transcription of page 42 of this text, so I have supplied it.

~ Brett

Minor corrections to LG 1881–1882, LG 1891–1892, and Duke finding aid

Kelley Franklin pointed out that in the 1881–1882 edition of Leaves of Grass the section 4 heading of "The Wound Dresser" was repeated and the phrase "many the days and nights" in the poem "On the Beach at Night" had been mistranscribed as "many the days and night." On checking, I discovered that this second error occurred also in our transcription of the 1891–1892 edition. Franklin also noted that in the record for duk.00034 in the Duke finding aid the word "Resurrection" had been misspelled in the title "Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of The Wheat." I have corrected these various errors in the relevant files.

~ Brett

Minor edits to the record for loc.00097 in the EAD for Hellman Collection at LC

Matt Cohen pointed out that the record for this item mistakenly referred to "John" rather than "Jules" Michelet, and in the course of revising the entry he and I discovered and revised several other inaccuracies and bits of misleading description.

~ Brett

Corrections to the 1867 Leaves of Grass

Many of the titles in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass appear on the page in a combination of full- and small-caps but the encoding for the small-caps had not been included. Said Fallaha has corrected this. He also noticed that sections 9-13 of "Sleep-Chasings" had been commented out, causing that section of the text to disappear from the HTML presentations of the volume. I have removed the comment marks. Finally, he corrected the numbering of page 183, which had been mistranscribed as 132.

~ Brett

Updates to Integrated Catalog and other Finding Aids

We have updated the integrated catalog of Whitman's literary manuscripts, as well as the individual catalog files for specific repositories, to reflect the new manuscripts and notebooks items now available on the Whitman Archive.

~ Nikki

Publication of early notebooks, prose manuscripts

I have published new index pages for the notebooks and manuscripts sections of the Whitman Archive.  The new pages are searchable and sortable and offer access to thirteen early notebooks and 118 prose manuscripts, as well as updated versions of the poetry manuscripts and Civil War notebooks previously available on the Whitman Archive.  Thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for support of this work, which was completed as part of the project "Walt Whitman as an Author before Leaves of Grass."  This work was a team effort, with important contributions from Brett Barney, Stephanie Blalock, Janel Cayer, Jonathan Cheng, Kirsten Clawson, Eric Conrad, Karin Dalziel, Sara Duke, Jessica Dussault, Ed Folsom, Nikki Gray, Kirby Little, Liz Lorang, Kevin McMullen, Natalie O'Neal, Ken Price, Stefan Schöberlein, and Jeannette Schollaert.

~ Nikki

Updated fiction introductions, bibliography

I have updated the introduction to Franklin Evans and "Fortunes of a Country Boy" to reflect the recent discovery of Jack Engle, another novel written by Walt Whitman.  I have also updated Stephanie Blalock's fiction publications and reprints bibliography and the associated map to reflect several new reprint entries.  Finally, we have corrected a dating error in the short fiction introduction (where "The Fireman's Dream" was dated to 1841 instead of the correct date of 1844) and a periodical title error in "About 'The Tomb-Blossoms.'"

~ Nikki

Update to "schoolmaster" notebook

I have updated the editorial note accompanying the Whitman Archive's transcription of Whitman's "a schoolmaster" notebook to reflect Zachary Turpin's recent discovery of Whitman's 1852 novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, the plot of which is drafted in this notebook.

~ Nikki

Errors corrected on periodical page for "Once a Week"

Ed had noticed a discrepancy in our wording about the publication dates of Whitman's poems published in Once a Week in the late 1890s. We had incorrectly stated that all three poems published in that periodical were published within months of Whitman's death in March 1892. Only one poem, "A Thought of Columbus," was published in 1892. The two other poems, "On, On the Same Ye Jocund Twain" and "Unseen Buds," had appeared in June of 1891. We have corrected the wording to reflect this, more clearly laying out the chronology of Whitman's poems published in Once a Week. The page can be seen here.

- Kevin

Small correction to Complete Prose Works (1892)

I noticed that the head for "Friendship, (The Real Article)" on p. 333 lacked parentheses, so I have supplied them.

~ Brett

Links added

To our links page I've added pointers to University of Iowa Press, University of Nebraska Press, Wiley-Blackwell, University of North Carolina Press, and the Whitman, Alabama project.

~ Brett

Typo in Complete Prose Works corrected

I happened to notice that, in our transcription of Complete Prose Works, the heading for "Dough-Face Song" had a superfluous "d" ("Dough-Faced Song"). I have removed it.

~ Brett

Typos in 1855 LG fixed; downloadable LG files updated

User Gregory Murray noted that our transcription of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass had, in two places, a superfluous space between a hyphen and the second element of a compound word. Further, he pointed out that the version of that file in the Downloads section of the Archive had not been updated to reflect the corrections he had pointed out several weeks ago. I corrected the typos and updated all of the Leaves files in the Downloads section, since the files for other editions were likewise out of sync.

~ Brett

Updated search page note to user

I updated the note to the user included on the Whitman Archive search page to indicate that the custom Google search for the site is currently returning incomplete results.  We are currently working to update the search across the site.  Until we are able to roll out the new search, users should do a full-site search on Google (www.google.com) by entering: site:whitmanarchive.org "your search term" to obtain complete results.

~ Nikki

Corrected note in "Letters from a Travelling Bachelor"

Jason Stacy noticed that one of the 14 October 1849 "Letters from a Travelling Bachelor" contained a note with the same erroneous information about porgies that we recently corrected in the "Letters from Paumanok" essay. He rewrote the note and I swapped it into the file.

~ Brett

Two corrections to lineation in 1855 edition of Leaves

User Gregory Murray pointed out that the TEI transcription had two superfluous <l> tags (on pages 16 and 82); these created erroneous line breaks. I have removed them.

~ Brett

Small corrections to 1871–1872 and 1891–1892 editions of Leaves of Grass

I noticed several transcription errors in two editions of  Leaves of Grass: Smallcaps had been neglected in the first words of the poems of the 1871–1872 edition and in "RISE O DAYS FROM YOUR FATHOMLESS DEEPS" in the main table of contents of the 1891–1892 edition; page breaks for the title pages of "Sands at Seventy" and "A Backward Glance" were placed in such a way that they were not showing up in the display; and "Yonnondio" had been omitted from the transcription of the "Sands at Seventy" table of contents. Said corrected all of these.

~ Brett

Corrected information in "Letters from Paumanok" annotation

User Drew Fetherston pointed out that our first note to the 27 June 1851 installment of "Letters from Paumanok" erroneously confounded porgies and mossbunkers/menhaden. Jason Stacy rewrote the note, crediting Fetherston.

~ Brett

Fixed typo in short fiction

Ed pointed out a typo in Whitman's story "The Fireman's Dream." The phrase "involuntary explamations of horror" should have been "involuntary exclamations of horror."  I have fixed the error.

~ Nikki

Removed broken syllabus link

The link to the syllabus "Selected American Authors: Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman" was no longer working and the syllabus for that course is no longer publicly available, so I took it off the "Teaching Resources" page.

~ Nikki

Whitman's Short Fiction Published

We have published a new section devoted to Whitman's short fiction on the Whitman Archive.  This section, edited by Stephanie Blalock and Nikki Gray, includes page images and transcriptions of 26 short stories as they were first published in periodicals, headnotes discussing the publication and reprinting history associated with each story, and a critical introduction to the short fiction.  We have also updated the bibliography of fiction publications and reprints and the associated map, and we have added a new "fiction" section to the Archive's editorial policy statement.

Thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for support of this project, and to the staff members who worked on it: Kirsten Clawson, Jeannette Schollaert, and Sara Duke. 

~ Stephanie and Nikki

Small Correction to a Review

Matt Cohen pointed out that the second "an" was missing from the title of "An English and an American Poet." I have supplied it.

~ Brett

Small Correction to 1860 Leaves of Grass

Ken noticed that an ae ligature was missing in the poem "Kosmos," so I have supplied it.

~ Brett