Nearly 3,000 new Walt Whitman papers discovered
Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - 16:40
in Psychology & Sociology
As a clerk in the U.S. Attorney General's Office in the 1860s and 1870s, Walt Whitman had a firsthand view of the legal, cultural and ideological challenges facing the nation after the Civil War. That experience, most believe, shaped his later works of poetry and prose. Now, a university researcher has discovered nearly 3,000 previously unknown Whitman documents from that era -- a trove of information that sheds new light on the legendary poet's post-war thinking, as well as on Whitman's published reflections on the state of the nation that soon followed.