Quick Hit: 19th century “Manly Health and Training” Guide written by Walt Whitman discovered + poesie

Quick Hit: 19th century “Manly Health and Training” Guide written by Walt Whitman discovered

By Chitown Kev

Saturday Apr 30, 2016 · 3:43 PM E

Now here’s what I get for surfing over at the UK Guardian in the wee hours of a Saturday morning: a story by Alison Flood that 19th century American poet Walt Whitman has been identified as the author of a 13-part guide to “manly health” that he originally published under a pseudonym.

A long-lost book-length guide to “manly health” by Walt Whitman, in which the great American poet tackles everything from virility to “care of the feet” and the attainment of a “nobler physique”, has been rediscovered by a scholar, more than 150 years after it was first published under a pen-name.

Written under the pseudonym Mose Velsor, a known pen-name for Whitman, the 13-part Manly Health and Training series was published in the New York Atlas in 1858 and runs to nearly 50,000 words. Zachary Turpin from the University of Houston stumbled across it when searching digital archives for Whitman’s pseudonyms, and finding a single hit for “Mose Velsor” in the NY Tribune, advertising the fact that his “original articles on manly training” were shortly to appear in the New York Atlas. He sent away for the Atlas microfilm, and was astonished to discover the 13-instalment series.

The entire text, titled Manly Health and Training, With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions, can be found online for free. And….uh, well…

Manly health! Is there not a kind of charm—a fascinating magic in the words? We fancy we see the look with which the phrase is met by many a young man, strong, alert, vigorous, whose mind has always felt, but never formed in words, the ambition to attain to the perfection of his bodily powers—has realized to himself that all other goods of existence would hardly be goods, in comparison with a perfect body, perfect blood—no morbid humors, no weakness, no impotency or deficiency or bad stuff in him; but all running over with animation and ardor, all marked by herculean strength, suppleness, a clear complexion, and the rich results (which follow such causes) of a laughing voice, a merry song morn and night, a sparkling eye, and an ever-happy soul!

I think that I could have identified Whitman as the writer of this paragraph even if the author was anonymous.

Zachary Turpin, the University of Houston graduate student in English who tracked down Whitman’s serial in old microfilmed copies of New York Atlas, says that there’s more in this text that’s “eyebrow-raising” than simply the erotic and homoerotic content.

In the journal, Turpin says the work can be seen as “an essay on male beauty, a chauvinistic screed, a sports memoir, a eugenics manifesto, a description of New York daily life, an anecdotal history of longevity, or a pseudoscientific tract”, and warns that it can be “eyebrow-raising”. “Readers should prepare to encounter a more-than-typically self-contradictory Whitman; his primary claims tilt from visionary to reactionary, commonsensical to nonsensical, egalitarian to racist, pacific to bloodthirsty – and back again,” he says.

Links:

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review: Volume 33, Number 3 (2016) Special Double Issue: Walt Whitman’s Newly Discovered “Manly Health and Training”

New York Times: Walt Whitman Promoted a Paleo Diet. by Jennifer Schuessler 4/29/16

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/4/30/1521697/-Quick-Hit-19th-century-Manly-Health-and-Training-Guide-written-by-Walt-Whitman-discovered

The Discovery of “Manly Health and Training”: Walt Whitman’s Long-Lost Guide to Getting the Body You’ve Always Wanted

April 29, 2016

NewYorkAtlasAd
An announcement for Walt Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training,” published in The New York Atlas on September 12, 1858. Image Courtesy of The American Antiquarian Society.

In the third open-access issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (WWQR) Editor Ed Folsom and Managing Editor Stefan Schöberlein publish in full a newly discovered book-length work by the poet Walt Whitman entitled “Manly Health and Training.” Zachary Turpin, a PhD candidate in English at the University of Houston, recently discovered “Manly Health and Training,” a previously unknown thirteen-part journalistic series of 47,000 words that originally appeared in the New York Atlas in 1858. Turpin’s important find means that “Manly Health and Training” can now be republished and confidently attributed to Whitman for the first time since 1858. As Turpin points out in the detailed introduction that accompanies “Manly Health and Training” in WWQR, surviving issues of the Atlas are rare today, even on microfilm, and he used one of the few remaining reels containing the newspaper, currently held by the American Antiquarian Society, to find “Manly Health and Training.” The byline for each of the installments lists the author as “Mose Velsor of Brooklyn,” a pen name that Whitman was known to have used occasionally for newspaper articles, and some of the articles from the “Manly Health” series also correspond in subject matter and/or wording with selections from Whitman’s notes on health and the body.

“Manly Health and Training,” which Turpin describes as a long lost “guide to living healthily in America,” stands as a remarkably significant new find. The articles promise to help fill in substantial gaps in the poet’s biography and to change the way we understand Whitman’s writings from this period. “Manly Health and Training” ran in the Atlas beginning on September 12, 1858, and ending the day after Christmas, December 26, 1858. This is approximately two years after the publication of the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856) by Fowler and Wells—a Brooklyn publishing firm known for their texts on phrenology and physiognomy—and two years before the much-expanded third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860) that saw the addition of the “Calamus” and “Enfans d’Adam” (“Children of Adam”) poems on homoerotic and heterosexual love, respectively. In addition to being published between these two volumes of Leaves of Grass, “Manly Health and Training” (1858) was printed at nearly the same time as Whitman is believed to have been working on a twelve-poem sequence about love between men that he titled “Live Oak, with Moss,” which would become the core of “Calamus.”

In order to create “Manly Love and Training,” according to Turpin, Whitman drew on a number of sources ranging from temperance periodicals to works on science and pseudoscience of the period. The series of articles are shaped by many identifiable aspects of nineteenth-century culture including such topics as phrenology, eugenics, male friendship, sports and sports figures, lecture and oratory, vegetarianism, and other social reform and self-help literature. The articles are remarkable, then, for their wide array of content, but they are equally surprising for what is largely absent: the topics of women’s bodies, health, and training. Such an absence, while perhaps not entirely unexpected, merits further investigation given that on September 16, 1888, Whitman told his friend Horace Traubel that women were among his “sturdiest defenders, upholders” and that Leaves of Grass was “essentially a woman’s book.”

FirstPage_NewYorkAtlas_halfThe first installment of Walt Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training” on the front page of The New York Atlas on September 12, 1858. Image Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Turpin’s discovery of Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training” will certainly shed new light on the poet’s activities in the years following the publication of the articles and leading up to and continuing through the Civil War. If, for example, Whitman advocated a training program that involved exercise and a healthy diet, then why did he choose to spend so much of his time in 1859 and the early 1860s at Pfaff’s, a New York beer cellar and popular American Bohemian hangout, known for its coffee, lager beer, and wine selection, as well as its substantial food offerings? How does Whitman’s interest in leading American men toward sound, muscular, and virile bodies change the way we view Whitman’s seeming need to volunteer in the hospitals of the Civil War, where he would have seen first-hand the devastating injuries—the gaping wounds—in those very bodies he was seeking to guide toward a state of  “perfect health”? And what does Whitman’s insistence that the very act of reading is not a “half-sleep” but rather a “gymnast’s struggle” mean for us, as readers of his works, in light of “Manly Health and Training,” with its assessment of prize-fighting and advocacy of exercise?

With the publication of “Manly Health and Training” in WWQR, we can begin to answer these questions and, no doubt, to formulate many others. But Turpin’s find, 158 years after the original publication of Whitman’s articles, should also draw our attention to the fact that even when it comes to well-known authors like Whitman, much remains to be discovered. This is likely true, not just of Whitman, but of many other nineteenth-century writers when our research includes newspapers and magazines. Examining periodicals in print and digital forms, as well as archival research in general, has yielded significant finds in the field of Whitman Studies over the past several years. A new Whitman poem, as well as numerous reprints of his short fiction and reprints of his poetry in periodicals have come to light, and, recently, a letter Whitman wrote for a Civil War Soldier was discovered in the National Archives. Turpin’s find also serves to remind researchers that not all newspapers and magazines from the past are digitized, available, and easily searchable online. In fact, many periodicals are still available only on microfilm and/or in print form. The discoveries we make in the future, then, will depend a great deal on where we look and how we preserve and use archival material in all formats.

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Walt Whitman in 1860, Photographer: Stephen Alonzo Schoff, after an oil portrait by Charles W. Hine, Original Plate in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress, Image Courtesy of The Walt Whitman Archive

Finally, the publication of “Manly Health and Training” in its entirety in the current WWQR is a noteworthy feat in itself. In October 2015, during open-access week, WWQR, a University of Iowa journal and the international journal of record in Whitman Studies, made the transition from a print journal to an online only, open-access publication with the help and support of the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio at the University of Iowa Libraries. This online format, as the editors of the journal make clear in their foreword to the issue, has made possible the publication in full of Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training.” In the journal’s previous print version, printing costs and page limits would have necessitated the careful selection of only a few excerpts from this previously unknown text. One of the many benefits of offering a scholarly journal as an online and open-access resource is that this digital format opens up a range of publishing options and formats not possible in print alone. As a result, the editors can share this newly discovered piece of the poet’s writing with an ever-growing international body of Whitman readers who access his writings via an internet connection. In the future, “Manly Health and Training” will also be available on the Walt Whitman Archive. If, as Whitman wrote in his advertisement for “Manly Health and Training,” he intended this text “for the People,” he almost certainly would have approved. It is my hope that all readers of “Manly Health and Training” will actively engage and even struggle with this piece as Whitman recommended, since it remains for us–the readers–to investigate how Whitman came to write this piece, to trace the origins of these ideas, and to determine how we, in coming to this text some 158 years after its first publication, might make use of it in our own time and in our own ways.

Stephanie M. Blalock

Digital Humanities Librarian &

Associate Editor, Walt Whitman Archive 

University of Iowa Libraries

http://blog.lib.uiowa.edu/studio/2016/04/29/the-discovery-of-manly-health-and-training-walt-whitmans-long-lost-guide-to-getting-the-body-youve-always-wanted/

A una semplice prostituta

Non scomporti – sii a tuo agio con me – sono Walt Whitman, liberale e forte come la Natura,
e finché il sole non ti eviterà, non sarò io ad evitarti,
finché le acque non si rifiuteranno di brillare per te, né le foglie di frusciare per te,
le mie parole non si rifiuteranno di brillare e stormire per te.

Piccola mia, fisso con te un appuntamento, e ti chiedo di prepararti per essere degna
di questo incontro,
ti chiedo anche di essere paziente e pura finché io giunga.

Per ora ti saluto con uno sguardo eloquente affinché tu non possa dimenticarmi.

Walt Whitman

A quelli che hanno fallito Walt Whitman – Jack Gallagher: To Those Who’ve Fail’d – Gustav Holst (1874-1934): The Mystic Trumpeter

http://www.controappuntoblog.org/2014/06/13/a-quelli-che-hanno-fallito-walt-whitman-jack-gallagher-to-those-whove-faild-gustav-holst-1874-1934-the-mystic-trumpeter/

Frederick Delius e Walt Whitman : Sea Drift ..

A Song of Joys by Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass #7: A

I Think I Could Turn And Live With Animals… By Walt Whitman

American Poetry: Walt Whitman by Monthly Review

il mio grido barbarico sopra i tetti del mondo.: Walt Whitman – Debussy – Nuages (Nocturne)

Beni Mora (Oriental Suite) Op.29 No.1 – Japanese Suite Op. 33 – Gustav Holst – Hymn to Dionysus, Op. 31 No. 2 – The Mystic Trumpeter, op. 18 – (from “Leaves of Grass”) by Walt Whitman

http://www.controappuntoblog.org/2014/03/06/beni-mora-oriental-suite-op-29-no-1-japanese-suite-op-33-gustav-holst-hymn-to-dionysus-op-31-no-2-the-mystic-trumpeter-op-18-from-leaves-of-grass-by-walt-whitman/

Gustav Holst : Brook Green Suite, H. 190 – Ode to Death

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