It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

The big doors of the country-barn stand open and ready. I am having a difficult time pulling myself away from the poem and from the Whitman archive to write this post. There is a lot I still want to learn about Whitman and Leaves of Grass before I even begin thinking about what it might mean to “de-familiarize” myself with it. At this point in my explorations of the archive: I am in the midst of reading about the “deathbed” edition. Some reactions to the Whitman archive:

TokenX is very cool. I experimented with making word clouds, searched for the most commonly used words, and searched by individual words. I also opened up the data into a spreadsheet so I could see, for example, that the word “woman” nearly doubled in frequency between the 1855 and 1860 editions, then decreased again in the later versions. The most frequently used verb in the 1856 version is “am” and the noun “earth” is used 145 times in that version. Joseph suggested we could create an equation out of word order. He was kidding, and I don’t think that would be too useful, but being able to look quickly at word frequency, what drops out, what comes back in, and when, does offer a vantage point into the structure of the poem that complements the notebooks, critical writings, and biographical stuff on the archive, or that could be used alone, to tell students something about the poem even before becoming familiar enough with it to give meaning to the idea of its defamiliarization.

My favorite thing on the archive is probably the extremely scratchy recording of Whitman reading from “America,” though I also love all the photographs. From the Teaching Materials page, I got completely distracted by the Dickinson electronic archive. While I somewhat digress, Joseph turned me onto the “hot little prophets” page. Then I got very meta and started reading the archive’s change log--not actually too interesting. I was disappointed by the correspondence page. Presumably, with some more digging, I could get to letters from Walt, but right now the page is only letters from Whitman’s brothers. I would rather be able to see both sides of the correspondence side by side from the same page, which appears to be a goal of the archive. The Walt Whitman biography, by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, looks very good and has lots of yummy links. The chronology page taught me stuff, like that in 1890 Whitman reacted to a “homosexual interpretation” of the “Calamus” poems by getting mad and claiming to have fathered six illegitimate children. However, the page would be helped a lot by adding links—when I read that I wasn’t sure what the “Calamus” poems were, and the easiest way to get an answer was not through the archive but by resorting to wikipedia.

Somewhat hidden in the archive, under articles and interviews from About the Archive, Kenneth M. Price has an article titled “Electronic Scholarly Editions," in which he asks the rhetorical question, “why are people making electronic editions?” And answers: it’s their capaciousness—so much more can be included without having to publish, or carry around, so many more volumes. This brings up the question of what to include and why.

"The idea of including everything in an edition is suitable for writers of great significance. Yet such an approach has some negative consequences: it can be seen as damaging to a writer (and might be seen as counterproductive for readers and editors themselves)."

This radical equalization of sources is an interesting issue. Letting students roam free in an electronic text allows them to prioritize material in their own way for their own reasons.

As I re-read the poem new questions to explore are occurring to me: what happens to the post-war poem? Do it’s reiterations begin to lose some of the optimism of 1855? What about sex? Does a poem so dripping with it in 1855, by a young man full of vigor and vim, become less about the urge and urge and urge as he grows older? What happens to the concern with slavery? I have a lot more reading to do before I can start to feel I have given fair time to these questions.