{"id":22773,"date":"2021-09-23T09:25:16","date_gmt":"2021-09-23T13:25:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/news\/?p=22773"},"modified":"2021-09-27T09:49:31","modified_gmt":"2021-09-27T13:49:31","slug":"marshall-faculty-member-discovers-new-writings-by-walt-whitman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/news\/2021\/09\/marshall-faculty-member-discovers-new-writings-by-walt-whitman\/","title":{"rendered":"Faculty member discovers new writings by Walt Whitman"},"content":{"rendered":"
Dr. Stefan Sch\u00f6berlein, an assistant professor in the Department of English and the director of digital humanities at Marshall University, along with a colleague from the University of Idaho, Dr. Zachary Turpin, are receiving acclaim in the literary world this month after their discovery of new texts penned by American poet Walt Whitman.<\/p>\n

Their discovery was announced in the latest edition of the open access journal Walt Whitman Quarterly Review<\/em>, available online now.
\nSitting at over 40,000 words, two newly unearthed sets of texts mark one of the most significant new discoveries about Whitman (1819-1892) in recent years. The discovery includes an unknown collection of letters to the editor, which Whitman wrote to the New Orleans Daily Crescent,<\/em> a newspaper he helped establish during the brief time that he lived there. They were published under the penname \u201cManhattan.\u201d Whitman grew up on Long Island and spent much of his life in and around New York.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been working on this since summer of 2019,\u201d Sch\u00f6berlein said. \u201cIt began with a hunch by Dr. Turpin and ultimately resulted in the attribution of around 50 unknown texts to Whitman.\u201d
\nAttribution was a lengthy process, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt actually took quite a bit of detective work to make sure that this was really Whitman, considering there is no mention of any of this in his surviving records,\u201d Sch\u00f6berlein added. \u201cStill, we not only found conclusive biographical evidence in these pieces but also employed a computational assessment that found significant stylistic overlaps between these texts and Whitman\u2019s known writings.\u201d
\nSch\u00f6berlein and Turpin\u2019s discovery also includes additional installments to a series of humorous sketches that shed new light on Whitman\u2019s experiences in New Orleans.<\/p>\n

All of these texts were printed seven years prior to Whitman\u2019s groundbreaking volume of poems Leaves of Grass<\/em> (1855). Whitman was 28 then and stayed in New Orleans just three months. By then, he was widely known as an accomplished prose writer and newspaperman.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe truism that Whitman only worked for the Crescent<\/em> while physically in New Orleans by now underlies most, if not all, scholarship on this time in the poet\u2019s life,\u201d Sch\u00f6berlein and Turpin wrote in their article. \u201cThis assumption is false.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sch\u00f6berlein and Turpin have shown that Whitman kept in touch with the paper and contributed a significant number of additional writings through the mail over a period of several months.
\n\u201cThese new writings shed light on a period in Whitman\u2019s life that scholars knew very little about until today,\u201d Sch\u00f6berlein said. \u201cThere is so much to learn here about Whitman\u2019s political leanings in these months, his attitudes about race and his ongoing interest in the republican revolutions in Europe. This is an exciting time to be a Whitman scholar.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMany Marshall students might not even know that Whitman stopped in what would later become West Virginia on his trip to New Orleans,\u201d Sch\u00f6berlein also noted. \u201cAnd like a true West Virginian, he complained about how bad the roads were. But he also praised the \u2018finest scenery\u2019 around Wheeling and Harper\u2019s Ferry.\u201d
\nThe discovery is \u201cmonumental,\u201d said Dr. Allison Carey, chair of the Department of English.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhitman, described by the Poetry Foundation as \u2018a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare,\u2019 is a central figure in the history of American literature,\u201d Carey said. \u201cA find of this magnitude from one of our foundational national writers is truly remarkable. Dr. Sch\u00f6berlein\u2019s work highlights the inherent value of the digital humanities at Marshall and the quality of its English department.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along with teaching, Sch\u00f6berlein is Marshall\u2019s new director of digital humanities and serves as a contributing editor for the Walt Whitman Archive. He is set to publish an edited collection of Whitman\u2019s New Orleans writings, including some of the newly discovered pieces, in the spring of 2022 (Walt Whitman’s New Orleans: Sidewalk Sketches and Newspaper Rambles,<\/em> LSU Press). Turpin and Sch\u00f6berlein are also working on a monograph reassessing Whitman\u2019s relationship to New Orleans for the University of Iowa Press\u2019s \u201cWhitman Series.\u201d<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Stefan Sch\u00f6berlein, an assistant professor in the Department of English and the director of digital humanities at Marshall University, along with a colleague from the University of Idaho, Dr. Zachary Turpin, are receiving acclaim in the literary world this month after their discovery of new texts penned by American poet Walt Whitman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":134,"featured_media":22774,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,45,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cola","category-featured","category-news-releases"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/134"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22773"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22778,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22773\/revisions\/22778"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}