A surprise discovery sheds new light on the great poet Walt Whitman
In Washington, a historian has discovered manuscripts which illustrate a historic moment in America: the end of the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination
In the manuscript reading room of the venerable Library of Congress in Washington, there is a strict regime. The guest must be not only a library card raise, lock up, he must not only his pocket, he label must not only one extra cards front and back with all sorts of personal information, he must also by signature guarantee that he obey all orders of the staff faithfully follow am.
The guest who has overcome these hurdles may be rewarded with Kenneth Price watch at work. Price is a friendly little man with thinning blond hair, a professor at the University of Nebraska pursues his mission in life: he explores the life and work of American poet Walt Whitman. Price has the right to a small mountain of letters of the poet, lie on the table edge he has mounted a camera with which he photographed these treasures and fixed, so that he can then put them on the Internet. And recently, Professor Kenneth Price has made a startling discovery.
Some newspapers reported that he was quite by chance stumbled on his sensational discovery, but that's not true. Kenneth Price, of course, knew that Whitman came to Washington in 1863, he also knew that Walt Whitman worked since 1865 for the Office of the Attorney General, the chief legal adviser to the American government. Governments now maintain their paperwork is not to throw away, they cancel everything. Kenneth Price then turned the request, look at the papers of the Attorney General be allowed to take. He took the bus into town, an hour away from Washington, and then blew the dust off files of the National Archives of the United States that year. "I'm not looking for a long time had," said Kenneth Price, "as I had turned a few pages, I saw the familiar handwriting. A few pages further on another sheet. Then another one. And one more thing." Then he came across a bunch of papers, which were covered with Walt Whitman's scrawl.
Evaluated the find is far, but it is clear already: The Whitman-researchers have reason to be happy to rub their hands. America for 1865 was an important, even a decisive year: The Civil War was murdered at the end, Abraham Lincoln was. It began that phase, the "reconstruction", is: So the military occupation of the southern states by the Union Army, the attempt to re-educate the politically racist Southerner. In response to these efforts by the Ku Klux Klan was founded. At the same time extended the United States is becoming ever more to the west. The federal government came into serious conflict with the Mormons in Utah, which was still practiced polygamy. And so on. And so on."There are people who believe that Whitman was nothing more than a minor employee," says Kenneth Price. "In that case, the letters he wrote as an official, give us information about what he knew and when. But I do not think he has just written down what was dictated to him. I rather think that his superiors him have had to make. "
How do you think of Washington in those years? "The U.S. capital was then under construction," replied Price. "So there was scaffolding everywhere." In addition, Washington was such a coveted how hard-fought spoils of the American Civil War. Richmond, Virginia - the capital of the rebels - was only 107 miles. The battlefield of Gettysburg, where Lincoln gave his famous speech, was just next door. The State of Maryland Washington enclosed on three sides; Maryland had not formally joined the Confederacy, but unofficially it was a slave state, who sympathized with the insurgents. Who was living in Washington, got the Civil War - he is now with 620 000 deaths by the bloodiest conflict in American history - with up close. Before the outbreak of the Civil War there was a hospital in Washington, after which there were one hundred. The city was thus a cross between hospital and construction site. And that's what the poet was coming to Washington: He considered it his duty to care for the wounded to keep to the dying hand.
Later, over dinner at a restaurant, the guest is asked what has really driven Kenneth Price to Walt Whitman. "His humanity, his dignity," says Price.Whitman was born in 1819 on Long Iceland. With 11 years of his school career was over - after which he worked as an assistant to lawyers, as a printer's apprentice and later became a teacher, then as editor, then printers. It was not until the age of 37 he took - actually self-published - published a book that he described to his death again and again, which he added more new poems, a book that incites in America today poets, novelists, moving, architects inspired.Its title, "Leaves of Grass" (grass), is a pun: "Grass" were then called works of lesser value, "leaves" were the sites to which such books were printed. The Whitman-researchers are still not agreed as to what brought the poet to throw his unbridled verses on paper: Was it a religious revelation, a bolt of lightning from the sky? A sexual experience with a muscular young man? The encounter with the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who later became the first fan of his book?
In any event, Whitman is one of the few poets who revolutionized the genre.Rolling his unrhymed verses then roll over, like waves on the beach, they foam, spray and cook. Whitman said "I" meant and everyone, he sang the praises of the common man and said to himself, he used the word "comrade" and said same-sex love, he praised to the skies to democracy and said a mystical vision: "Walt Whitman, a cosmos, of Manhattan the son sentimental, / Stormy, carnal, sensual, eating, drinking and persuasive / no play, he is not about men and women, or away from them, / It is neither modest nor shameless. " Gustav Landauer, the gentle anarchist, from Bavaria, loved Whitman and translated many of his poems. And Thomas Mann, with the help of Whitman learned to overcome his initial disdain for America and the mass democracy. Whitman looks at pictures of mostly wild: a man with a white beard, unkempt hair, striking blue eyes and a floppy hat.
Was there in Washington dress code, if you worked in the office of the Attorney General? "Not that I knew," says Kenneth Price. We can not imagine why that Whitman in the morning just as we know it from photos, which means a slouch hat, came into the office. Sometimes, said Kenneth Price, he had probably stayed there at night to read and to write in between the occasional verse, for his life Whitman was clammy, and the Office of the Attorney General was in the winter, at least well heated. When not working or writing verses, he visited the wounded on the Civil War and gave them his last dollar.
Once the guest has said goodbye to Kenneth Price, and the subway sauntered is him falling at the entrance of the station at Dupont Circle a few verses of Whitman, the then large sculptured stand in stone: "So in the silence, in dream projections / I return, I will take up the thread again, walk through hospitals, / The wounded, the wounded I pacify with soothing hand, / For the restless, I'm sitting up all night - some are so young, / Some suffer so much - I remember the experience, so bittersweet ... " Hard to imagine that the man who wrote these verses, while leading the banal existence of an official. But just as it was.
