Tuesday, April 19, 2011

WOW - This Is Really Exciting

Papers of Walt Whitman were found by a researcher in Nebraska of all places.  Now, this is not Slim Whitman, OK?  Walt Whitman is, in my opinion, the man responsible for all great & good poetry that the U.S. of A. has produced & is still producing.
The newly discovered documents "were crucial for (Whitman's) writing of one of the most important meditations on the meaning of American democracy," Price said. "They're also vital for understanding Whitman's late poetry. Anyone writing about the latter parts of his career is going to want to figure out what the relationship was between what he knew and when he knew it, and what he had to say in 'Democratic Vistas' and his later poetry."
 *****
The documents, which were revealed at a news conference at the National Archives this morning, consist of Whitman's handwritten clerical work from 1865 to 1873, when he was a scribe in the attorney general's office in the nation's capital. For more than two years, Price pored over a range of documents, including large, bound 900-page letter books in the archive, discovering for the first time thousands of official federal letters that were written in Whitman's hand.
"I had a hunch there might be three, four, maybe five documents still there. I looked through hundreds of pages without finding anything, and was starting to get bleary-eyed," Price said. "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."


 This:



Not this:

1 comment:

nonheroicvet said...

Slim Whitman was noted for his sheep songs such as I Remember Ewe. Seemed a little odd but who knows how big the shepard market is.