0.19 Civil war washington, the walt whitman archive, and some  (Page 2/12)

My thinking on a set of interrelated issues—what is it we should be editing? how should we go about it? how should we fund it? how should we position it within the disciplines?—is shaped by involvement in two digital projects, The Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org) and Civil War Washington (civilwardc.org) and by ongoing efforts to locate support to fund their development. The two projects differ in many ways. The Walt Whitman Archive is far along in its development, generously funded, and has a clear plan of development. Civil War Washington , in contrast, is just getting started, lacks external funding, and has a less obvious trajectory. Of the two, the Whitman Archive , begun in 1995, more closely resembles a traditional print edition at least partly because of the time at which it came into being. Civil War Washington , begun in 2006, is less so for the same reason. I think both projects reflect a broader movement in our time to stretch, remake, and revitalize what editing can mean. They also illustrate some of the challenges editors will need to address in the coming decades.

The Walt Whitman Archive , perhaps best described as a digital thematic research collection, has at its core a scholarly edition, in progress. One of our objectives is to edit, introduce, and annotate all of the poet’s writings. We currently publish all six editions of Leaves of Grass that Whitman supervised, over a hundred of his poetry manuscripts, his Civil War letters, the two British editions of his poetry, and selected foreign language editions in German, Spanish, and Russian (with other languages in process). We devote time to translations because we recognize that most people in the world read Whitman first in a language other than English. Moreover, Whitman has been appropriated and remade in extraordinary ways as he has crossed various cultural borders.

To some extent, the sequencing of our work has been influenced by what we have inherited from our print predecessor, the New York University Press (NYUP) edition of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman . For the sake of simplicity, my discussion of the Walt Whitman Archive focuses only on its most recent print predecessor, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman . However, that print edition was not by any means the first gathering of Whitman’s scattered writings. The Collected Writings was preceded by the ten volumes of The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1902). For a discussion of The Complete Writings , see Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp. 130-31. Our work has been guided by this print edition's remarkable achievements as well as its failures; often the latter have given us a scholarly imperative for new work and a built-in justification when applying for grants. Nothing the NYUP included in the Collected Writings is outside our scope, and we of course include much they wouldn’t have considered relevant given their aims. The Collected Writings edition, like most other twentieth-century editorial efforts, was author-centered and oriented toward presenting the author’s “final intention” for an individual work. This focus on the author led to the publication of a one-sided correspondence, with only Whitman’s own letters being reproduced rather than the full exchange. The Collected Writings also privileged the so-called deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (1891-1892) to the neglect of the five earlier editions of this work. Most people now think the first edition (1855) was Whitman’s most daring and experimental achievement, and it is widely regarded as the single most important volume of poetry ever published on this continent. Some scholars have gone even further in their claims. The renowned critic Lawrence Buell recently described the first edition of Leaves of Grass as the “single most original book of poetry ever written in the history of the world.” See his “Walt Whitman as an Eminent Victorian” in Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays , ed. Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), p. 296. Yet the editors of the Collected Writings didn’t print the first edition in any of their twenty-two volumes. When The New York University Press ceased publishing the Collected Writings in 1984, they had issued many more volumes than were originally projected. Despite the magnitude of what had been accomplished, many of the original objectives of the edition were not met. For example, the poetry manuscripts and periodical printings of Whitman’s poetry were never collected, and the long-promised journalism, projected to appear in six volumes, never appeared in the NYUP edition. Peter Lang eventually published two volumes of the journalism in 1998 and 2003, though these volumes cover only the period from 1834-1848, leaving Whitman’s innumerable contributions to periodicals in the final forty-four years of his life still to be edited. The Peter Lang volumes are produced so as to replicate the appearance of the New York University Press edition, though the editors of that series (all now deceased) did not oversee their production. Arguably, the Peter Lang volumes constitute volumes 23 and 24 of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman , and a 25 ^th volume, treating recently discovered correspondence, edited by Ted Genoways, was published by University of Iowa Press in 2004.