{"id":4743,"date":"2016-04-29T10:15:43","date_gmt":"2016-04-29T15:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/?p=4743"},"modified":"2016-12-02T13:11:43","modified_gmt":"2016-12-02T19:11:43","slug":"the-discovery-of-manly-health-and-training-walt-whitmans-long-lost-guide-to-getting-the-body-youve-always-wanted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/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\/","title":{"rendered":"The Discovery of \u201cManly Health and Training\u201d: Walt Whitman\u2019s Long-Lost Guide to Getting the Body You\u2019ve Always Wanted"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"NewYorkAtlasAd\"<\/a>
An announcement for Walt Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training,” published in The New York Atlas<\/em> on September 12, 1858. Image Courtesy of The American Antiquarian Society.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the third open-access issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review <\/i>(WWQR<\/i>)<\/a>\u00a0<\/i><\/span>Editor Ed Folsom and Managing Editor Stefan Sch\u00f6berlein<\/span> publish in full a newly discovered book-length work by the poet Walt Whitman entitled \u201c<\/span>Manly Health and Training<\/span><\/a>.\u201d Zachary Turpin, a PhD candidate in English at the University of Houston, recently discovered \u201cManly Health and Training,\u201d a previously unknown thirteen-part journalistic series of 47,000 words that originally appeared in the <\/span>New York Atlas<\/span><\/i> in 1858. Turpin\u2019s important find means that \u201cManly Health and Training\u201d 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 \u201cManly Health and Training\u201d in <\/span>WWQR<\/span><\/i>, surviving issues of the <\/span>Atlas<\/span><\/i> 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 \u201cManly Health and Training.\u201d The byline for each of the installments lists the author as \u201cMose Velsor of Brooklyn,\u201d a pen name that Whitman was known to have used occasionally for newspaper articles, and some of the articles from the \u201cManly Health\u201d series also correspond in subject matter and\/or wording with selections from Whitman\u2019s notes on health and the body.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cManly Health and Training,\u201d which Turpin describes as a long lost \u201cguide to living healthily in America,\u201d stands as a remarkably significant new find. The articles promise to help fill in substantial gaps in the poet\u2019s biography and to change the way we understand Whitman\u2019s writings from this period. \u201cManly Health and Training\u201d ran in the <\/span>Atlas<\/span><\/i> 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 <\/span>Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i> (1856)<\/span><\/a> by Fowler and Wells\u2014a Brooklyn publishing firm known for their texts on phrenology and physiognomy\u2014and two years before the much-expanded third edition of <\/span>Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i> (1860)<\/span><\/a> that saw the addition of the \u201c<\/span>Calamus<\/span><\/a>\u201d and \u201c<\/span>Enfans d\u2019Adam<\/span><\/a>\u201d (\u201cChildren of Adam\u201d) poems on homoerotic and heterosexual love, respectively. In addition to being published between these two volumes of <\/span>Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i>, \u201cManly Health and Training\u201d (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 \u201cLive Oak, with Moss,\u201d which would become the core of \u201cCalamus.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In order to create \u201cManly Love and Training,\u201d 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\u2019s bodies, health, and training. Such an absence, while perhaps not entirely unexpected, merits further investigation given that on September 16, 1888<\/a>, Whitman told his friend Horace Traubel that women were among his \u201csturdiest defenders, upholders\u201d and that Leaves of Grass<\/i> was \u201cessentially a woman\u2019s book.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"FirstPage_NewYorkAtlas_half\"<\/a>
The first installment of Walt Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training” on the front page of The New York Atlas<\/em> on September 12, 1858. Image Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Turpin\u2019s discovery of Whitman\u2019s \u201cManly Health and Training\u201d will certainly shed new light on the poet\u2019s 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 <\/span>Pfaff\u2019s<\/span><\/a>, 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\u2019s interest in leading American men toward sound, muscular, and virile bodies change the way we view Whitman\u2019s seeming need to volunteer in the hospitals of the Civil War, where he would have seen first-hand the devastating injuries\u2014the gaping wounds\u2014in those very bodies he was seeking to guide toward a state of \u00a0\u201cperfect health\u201d? And what does Whitman\u2019s insistence that the very<\/span> act of reading<\/span><\/a> is not a \u201chalf-sleep\u201d but rather a \u201cgymnast\u2019s struggle\u201d mean for us, as readers of his works, in light of \u201cManly Health and Training,\u201d with its assessment of prize-fighting and advocacy of exercise?<\/span><\/p>\n

With the publication of \u201cManly Health and Training\u201d in <\/span>WWQR<\/span><\/i>, we can begin to answer these questions and, no doubt, to formulate many others. But Turpin\u2019s find, 158 years after the original publication of Whitman\u2019s 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 <\/span>new Whitman poem<\/span><\/a>, as well as numerous<\/span> reprints of his short fiction<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>reprints of his poetry<\/span><\/a> in periodicals have come to light, and, recently, a <\/span>letter Whitman wrote for a Civil War Soldier<\/span><\/a> was discovered in the National Archives. Turpin\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"0061860BostonbyphotographStephenalonzoschoffcharles<\/a>
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<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Finally, the publication of \u201cManly Health and Training\u201d in its entirety in the current <\/span>WWQR <\/span><\/i>is a noteworthy feat in itself. In October 2015, <\/span>during open-access week<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>WWQR<\/span><\/i>, 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 <\/span>Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio<\/span><\/a> 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\u2019s \u201cManly Health and Training.\u201d In the journal\u2019s 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\u2019s writing with an ever-growing international body of Whitman readers who access his writings via an internet connection. In the future, \u201cManly Health and Training\u201d will also be available on the <\/span>Walt Whitman Archive<\/span><\/i><\/a>. If, as Whitman wrote in his advertisement for \u201cManly Health and Training,\u201d he intended this text \u201cfor the People,\u201d he almost certainly would have approved. It is my hope that all readers of \u201cManly Health and Training\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stephanie M. Blalock<\/p>\n

Digital Humanities Librarian &<\/span><\/p>\n

Associate Editor, <\/span>Walt Whitman Archive<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

University of Iowa Libraries<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the third open-access issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (WWQR)\u00a0Editor Ed Folsom and Managing Editor Stefan Sch\u00f6berlein publish in full a newly discovered book-length work by the poet Walt Whitman entitled \u201cManly Health and Training.\u201d Zachary Turpin, a PhD candidate in English at the University of Houston, recently discovered \u201cManly Health and Training,\u201dContinue reading “The Discovery of \u201cManly Health and Training\u201d: Walt Whitman\u2019s Long-Lost Guide to Getting the Body You\u2019ve Always Wanted”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":184,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,6],"tags":[26,25,19,17],"syndication":[30],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4743"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/184"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4743"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4767,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4743\/revisions\/4767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4743"},{"taxonomy":"syndication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/syndication?post=4743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}