Walt Whitman's work as clerk discovered

The words weren't poetic, but they flowed from Walt Whitman's pen in the writer's distinctive hand.

D's looped to the left. X's looked like SC. W's and J's had sweeping flourishes.

Kenneth Price, a Whitman expert from the University of Nebraska, knew the penmanship well after years of studying the "good gray poet."

He and other scholars also knew Whitman had copied documents into government record books while a clerk in Washington from the Civil War through 1873.

But no one had ferreted them out until Price began a serious search at the National Archives office in College Park, Md.

He found 3,000 pieces of Whitman's handwriting, offering a window on his life in Washington - a time that shaped the poet's creative years in Camden, where he lived with his brother George and later purchased a home.

The discovery was announced by the archives last week as the nation marked the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

"I didn't know if I would spot something from Whitman," said Price, coeditor of the Walt Whitman Archive, an acclaimed online resource of the poet's works. "I hoped to find four or five documents if I was lucky.

"I found one, then nothing, then a whole string of them, and then several hundred," he said. "I kept coming back and finding more."

Price was still uncovering Whitman's transcriptions last week. Most recorded the mundane business of government.

Sir:

The enclosed papers have been referred to the Attorney General ad interim for a Report by the President . . .

Respectfully, Your Obedient Servant,

M.F. Pleasants,

Chief Clerk

 Like a human copying machine, Whitman dutifully rewrote a July 14, 1868, document into a record book. In the margin, he added:

This letter has been withdrawn and cancelled - is to be considered as never having been written.

W.W.

"I knew the handwriting like I knew a relative's handwriting," Price said. Most "bear someone else's signature, but I was convinced they were written by Walt Whitman."

The discovery "could have a real influence on scholarly work on the whole body of Whitman's work," said Tyler Hoffman, professor of English and associate dean at the Rutgers-Camden College of Arts and Sciences and editor of the online Whitman journal Mickle Street Review.

In his poetry, "Whitman really was dealing with issues the country was going through very squarely," said Hoffman, author of the forthcoming book American Poetry in Performance: From Whitman to Hip Hop. "This allows us to see more clearly what he was reacting to."

Whitman was in New York when he found his brother on the list of casualties from the Battle of Fredericksburg.

"He rushed to the front and found his brother with a superficial wound to the cheek, and many other soldiers who were more badly wounded," Price said. "He was asked to help and accompanied many of them back to Washington."

Whitman "found he could be useful, caring for the wounded soldiers, and he visited tens of thousands of them" over the years, Price said. "He'd give them oranges and write letters for them to wives, mothers, and loved ones."

To support himself in Washington, Whitman worked as a clerk in the Army paymaster's office and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He was fired from the bureau after Secretary of the Interior James Harlan went into Whitman's desk and found a heavily annotated edition of Leaves of Grass - first published in 1855 - with some poems marked for deletion.

"Whitman was a candid poet who talked of sexuality," Price said. "Harlan thought the book was immoral or obscene."

Whitman's dismissal caused an uproar, with many in and out of government coming to his defense. "He was immediately hired in the Attorney General's Office and had no interruption to his income," Price said. "He also benefited from the publicity, with more people buying his work."

Though much of the content was dry, Whitman's clerking duties - copying letters about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, treason, war crimes and international policy - influenced him, Price said.

"The issues he was confronting as a clerk bear not only on his new poetry after the war, but on poetry that he wrote previously," said Hoffman of Rutgers. "He was actively going back and rewriting for later editions of Leaves of Grass."

Whitman came to Camden in 1873 at 54 and remained until his death in 1892. He lived at his brother's house at 431 Stevens St., where he penned some of his most enduring prose. (In 1994, fire destroyed the home where he had spent hours in a bright, airy parlor reading newspapers and entertaining author Oscar Wilde, artist Thomas Eakins and naturalist John Burroughs.)

In 1884, Whitman moved to the only home he ever owned, in the 300 block of what then was Mickle Street. He spent time reading and writing in a rocking chair in his bedroom, surrounded by a sea of newspapers, letters, and crumbled manuscripts that littered the floor. The house remains a monument to the poet and his work.

The discovery in the National Archives helps scholars better understand the origins of Whitman's Camden writings.

"You could speculate before," said Hoffman. "You could say he was a clerk and probably knew about this issue or that issue. Now you don't have to speculate."