INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

On-Line Whitman Archive Sings With Works
of the Poet, Making the 'Body Electric'

Walt Whitman imagined himself to be everywhere. His poems churn with scenes of 19th-century American life, one after the other, from coast to coast. His lines pulse with details -- of flesh, of grass, of seas and skies. His words sing of the human spirit.

ALSO HEAR: Listen to what is believed to be the voice of Walt Whitman, taken from an original Edison cylinder. He reads four lines of his poem "America."   Real Audio 14.4   Real Audio 28.8 Produced for the Web with permission from Ed Folsom, a professor of English at the University of Iowa. Read a history of the recording.

Now, in countless digital bits, Whitman is indeed everywhere. A team of American-literature scholars has developed the Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive, a World-Wide Web site that offers a modern-day rendition of the "body electric" that Whitman envisioned. It provides almost all of Whitman's poetry, facsimiles of manuscripts, galleries of famous and controversial photographs, images of paintings that inspired some of his verse, and transcripts of the often-harsh reviews of his works.

The site also provides classroom activities for high-school and college teaching.

"The nature of Whitman's work is such that no print edition could really do justice to him," says Kenneth M. Price, co-director of the archive and a professor of American studies and English at the College of William and Mary. For example, Whitman's most-famous poem, "Song of Myself," lacked a title when it was first published, and it was changed several times in six subsequent editions. But most students -- and many scholars -- focus on one edition, the so-called "death bed" version of 1891-92.

Ed Folsom, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, directs the project with Dr. Price. They decided to collaborate after Dr. Folsom published an article in the journal Resources for American Literary Study (The Chronicle, June 29, 1994) calling for the creation of hypertext copies of all of Whitman's works. Charles Green, a doctoral student at William and Mary, has managed the on-line project since its inception.

The site's first offering was an extensive series of photographs of Whitman, who was one of the most photographed men of his time. Dr. Folsom, who edits the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, first reproduced the photographs in the journal and then converted them into digital images for viewing on line.

Courtesy the Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive

Each photograph is thoroughly annotated, and the notes often include comments Whitman made about the images as he looked over them later in life. Referring to a characteristic photograph of the 1860s that shows him in an open-collared white shirt (left), Whitman said, "How well I was then! -- not a sore spot -- full of initiative, vigor, joy -- not much belly, but grit, fibre, hold, solidity. Indeed, all through those years -- that period -- I was at my best -- physically at my best, mentally, every way."

One set of photographs in the on-line gallery shows an older man, fully nude, in seven poses. The photographs were taken by Whitman's friend Thomas Eakins, the famous American painter. In studying the origins of the photos, Dr. Folsom has come to believe that they are of Whitman. The images have been cited in recent studies of Whitman's erotic "Calamus" poems, which are generally recognized as the written expression of his romantic relationships with men.

Beyond the photographs, the site serves as a one-stop resource for researchers eager to compare hand-written and printed versions of Whitman's works. The site is invaluable for that purpose because the poet's original manuscripts are scattered among university and public libraries throughout the United States. The hand-written pages of the "Calamus" poems -- which were originally called "Live Oak, with Moss" -- reveal every crossed-out word of Whitman's revisions. Facsimiles of the many editions of Leaves of Grass, the poet's first book of verse, offer a look at the page layouts and typesetting that Whitman, who was once a printer, directed himself.

The riches of the Web site are also available on a CD-ROM produced by Primary Source Media, a multimedia publisher in Connecticut. The CD-ROM, which is available for $2,000 a copy and is intended for sale to research libraries, includes a recording of what is thought to be Whitman's voice, as well as the 22 volumes of The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman (New York University Press).

Now the Whitman team is joining with scholars of Emily Dickinson's work to create a Web site and CD-ROM on both poets. The Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, a program of the U.S. Department of Education, is giving the collaborators $177,000 over three years to complete the project.

Meanwhile, Dr. Folsom, Dr. Price, and Mr. Green have started to create hypertextual connections within Whitman's poetry. A click on the phrase "life-lumps" in the 1881-82 version of "Song of Myself," for example, brings readers to information on phrenology, the pseudoscience that claims to evaluate personality and intelligence by scrutinizing the shape of the skull. Phrenology was a practice much applauded by Whitman, who was delighted by the exuberant personality that the shape of his own head was said to reveal.

"Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?" Whitman once asked. In hypertext, the better question may be, Have you ever had so much fun in the process?

For other Internet resources related to American poets, see:

• The Chronicle's collection of English and literature resources

•   Real Audio 14.4
•   Real Audio 28.8

History of the recording

Dr. Folsom had long heard rumors that a recording of Whitman's voice existed, even though the poet died in 1892, just as the era of sound recordings was dawning. But the Whitman scholar didn't find the recording until 1992, when a professor of English at Midland College mentioned it in an article he submitted to Dr. Folsom's journal, the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. The professor, Larry Griffin, had found the recording on a cassette tape in Midland's library. He had been playing it for his students for years.

The cassette tape includes a 1951 NBC radio program, called "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow," that was narrated by the journalist Leon Pearson. On the tape, Mr. Pearson says that NBC reproduced the recording of what is believed to be Whitman from a damaged wax cylinder that was found in the collection of a former New York elevator operator named Roscoe Haley. Scholars have determined that the cylinder was recorded in 1889 or 1890 -- a little more than a decade after Thomas Edison's 1877 invention of the phonograph. The cylinder has since been lost, but a recording of NBC's recording of the cylinder is now in Dr. Folsom's possession.

No one can be sure that the recording is of Whitman's voice, Dr. Folsom says, but few scholars have tried to refute it. The four verses that were rescued from the recording are from "America," a six-line poem that Whitman first published in the New York Herald in 1888. "No one knows if the final two lines of the poem were ever recorded by Whitman," Dr. Folsom says. "It certainly sounds as if he is concluding with the fourth line, but it's possible he went on with lines five and six." If so, the cylinder was apparently too damaged for the last two lines to be retrieved.

To Dr. Folsom's knowledge, this is the first time the recording has been made available on line.

America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

The last two lines, not in this recording, are:

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.