This is a guest post by Manuscript Division historian Barbara Bair.
As of May 27, 2025, volunteers can transcribe and review an exciting variety of addenda and supplementary materials from the Manuscript Division’s Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection via the By the People crowdsourcing transcription Walt Whitman campaign.
Items categorized as Addenda include fragmentary materials in Whitman’s hand — thoughts on the physiology of the body, instructions to a printer — and printed items that document the famed poet as a popular celebrity, public intellectual, friend, and cultural commentator.
“Supplementary” materials are divided into three crowdsourcing projects for ease of transcription: Supplementary File I, Supplementary File II, and Supplementary File III. These projects include a variety of programs, lectures, reviews, articles, news clippings, brochures, letters, literary criticism, and whole issues of literary magazines containing articles about Whitman’s work. These materials span more than a century, from the Victorian period into the post-World War II era.
A sampling of Supplementary File items includes an undated, handmade pamphlet containing the verses of Whitman’s famous 1865 elegy to Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d,” with an artistic rendering of a hand holding a sprig of lilacs on its cover. There is also a printed admission ticket for an October 1890 lecture about Whitman by famed orator Robert Green Ingersoll, delivered in Philadelphia as a fundraiser for the ailing elderly poet, who was working on what would become his “death-bed edition” of Leaves of Grass (finished in 1891, published in 1892). Copious printed materials from the 1900s include the flyer for a May 1919 celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Whitman’s birth, sponsored by the Camden, New Jersey, Elks lodge, held as World War I was coming to an end.
Most of the materials newly available for transcription were created about Whitman by other authors, either during his lifetime or long after his death. Items include literary criticism, lecture materials, and musical performances based on Whitman’s poetry. There is ample evidence of Whitman’s grassroots popularity and materials that reveal the enduring importance of his poetry in local communities and gatherings. The items document commemorative events and Whitman celebrations sponsored by fraternal associations, religious groups, organizations, lecture circuits, settlement houses, and at lodges, community centers, neighborhood playhouses, and concert halls. For example, public history commemorations of Whitman are represented through a Whitman statue by sculptor Jo Davidson that was placed in Bear Mountain State Park, New York, in 1939, and the creation of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Historic Site on Long Island after World War II.
In honor of the May 31 anniversary of Whitman’s birthday, you can learn more about the poet of democracy and his lasting legacy by participating in the crowdsourcing transcription process yourself. Find out more about it at https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/walt-whitman/.
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