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The Walt Whitman Archive
The Whitman Archive's correspondence project, which presents Whitman's outgoing and incoming letters (forthcoming) and letters of the Whitman family (currently Thomas Jefferson and George Washington Whitman, in the future to include Louisa Van Velsor Whitman), brings together previously edited print material and freshly edited material that has never appeared in print. The Archive gathers these texts in a single, searchable environment.
Archive staff have transcribed letters from digital scans of the original manuscripts or from previously edited print volumes of correspondence. The source text for every transcription is identified immediately following the transcription. In instances where the Archive presents transcriptions derived from earlier print volumes, both the source text and repository of the original manuscript are identified. Letter transcriptions derived from earlier print volumes reproduce the text of the letter as found in the source text. Letters transcribed from the Archive's digital images of the original manuscripts have been newly transcribed and edited, often for the first time.
This project foregrounds the text of the individual letters. Although the Archive has drawn on print volumes in letter transcriptions, we do not claim nor intend to offer digital editions of these print volumes, as we have done elsewhere on the site with current Whitman criticism. Instead, we present the letters in a digital format, and the individual letter constitutes the root unit of every file.
All editorial apparatus is presented secondary to the letter transcriptions, with the exception of a title supplied for each letter. (Titles identify the letter writer, recipient, and date.) Editorial content, including footnotes, is a combination of new information composed by Archive staff and existing material from the print editions. Material reproduced from print editions does not necessarily recreate the text or print environment of the original. Archive staff have attempted to avoid redundancies, such as identification of repositories in footnotes, and have therefore deleted some notes. In other instances, where new information has become available since the publication of the print editions, footnotes have been added or revised. New and revised footnotes are identified by a bracketed "[WWA]" following the text of the note. Editorial material that appears prior to the text of a letter in the print volume has been moved to the first footnote following the letter transcription, in keeping with the Archive's policy to privilege the text of the letters. In these instances, minor changes in the language of the original editorial material have been silently revised (e.g., we have changed "the following letter" to "the above letter") and footnotes in leading material have been transcribed as parenthetical citations. Given these changes, users should not assume that footnote numbers, as they appear on the Whitman Archive, correspond with the numbers as they appear in the print volumes. Content changes, however, have been clearly identified.
All material from print editions has been reproduced with permission of the publisher and copyright holder.