Keeping Tally with Meaning: Reading Numerals in Walt Whitman's Manuscripts

Abstract

ONE OF THE GREAT GIFTS of digital age to literary research and pedagogy is access to images of writers' manuscripts. Of particular interest is a writer like Walt Whitman, whose work is out of copyright and whose manuscripts routinely attract literary historians. Teaching or studying development of poem that would become I Sing Body Electric, for example, now requires only a copied URL if one wants to use manuscript 13 from Duke University's Trent Collection (Figure 1) for classroom discussion or source document analysis.1 This document includes a list of human body parts in many ways congruent-and fascinatingly not so-with anatomical features appearing in published poem. In it we can see a deep framework for a section of Whitman's poem as he plays out logic of his bodily catalog in full. But manuscript also provokes new questions about why some elements from draft made it into printed poem and why others were altered or left out (man-nuts, for example, was intriguingly displaced by inward and outward round in version, while perhaps less surprisingly, upper half leg was left out).But turn document sideways, and other questions, requiring other modes of analysis, emerge. On manuscript, scrawled between columns, appears number 1856 atop number 1776, followed by a line, and then number 80. Traditional left-toright reading techniques don't easily explain how notation-a kind found often in Whitman's manuscripts-functions in relation to finished poetry's content, but an unconventional analytical approach can. In this case, Whitman's famous character of old man six feet tall and loved by all who saw him may have been occasion of calculation. Whitman describes age-enlightened farmer and father of poem as being over eighty years old. The number aligns with version of Leaves of Grass that incorporates first appearance of list of body parts drawn from this manuscript, in poem then titled Poem of The Body. The number 1776 likely refers to official year of United States independence from Great Britain. Whitman was trying to determine number of years between claiming of independence and his own historical moment of publication. He may have done so to verify that age of character he introduced in poem year before, in its 1855 version, would still bracket country's initial moment of political democracy and Whitman's instantiation of a democratic poetic form. The vertical line dividing page, however, curiously weaves to accommodate mathematical notation: might this list have been written earlier, and re-consulted for publication? Without marginal annotation of MS 13, eighty-year link and its attendant questions can fade as we focus on manuscript's linguistic content. A mathematical sideways glance helps make visible a step in process of poetic creation and interdependence of Whitman's mathematical skill and his poetic acts of imagination.If we take manuscripts seriously as objects of study in themselves, we can relate such digits and operations, or similar annotations, more intimately to story of an author's world and his poetry. Though their layouts vary according to chirographic and morphological conventions of times in which they were made, manuscripts often contain violations or manipulations of space of page that, for students accustomed to printed text (and digital texts that use print conventions), can challenge interpretive norms. Read with a . . . wandering eye, Marta Werner writes, the draft may disturb very idea of still, absolute text, revealing it as only one possible realization of a matrix that precedes and sometimes follows it. Under these conditions, draft is no longer a point of departure for 'work,' into which it ultimately vanishes, but, rather, a witness to 'poetics of writing. …