New Book by Walt Whitman

[pornofan]

Most people do not know that the "good gray poet" (sometimes humorously aka the "good gay poet") did a lot of writing and editing for various local Brooklyn newspapers, some of which published short stories of his as well. Common enough back then. It was after all where O. Henry's best known works were published– newspapers, that is.

But until now what has not been known is that Whitman actually did create a series of columns for which notes have been found in his hand. Since the newspaper it appeared in is not digitized, it took some detective work in actual microfilm to turn up the long-lost book-length guide to "manly health," in which the great American poet tackles everything from virility to "care of the feet" and the attainment of a "nobler physique," has been rediscovered by a scholar, more than 150 years after it was first published under the pseudonym Mose Velsor, a known pen-name for Whitman in the New York Atlas in 1858, It runs to nearly 50,000 words.
The entire text of Manly Health and Training is published online for free in the new issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. Editor Ed Folsom, a
professor at the University of Iowa, writes in an introductory note that the remarkable find will "alter the course of Whitman scholarship and biography."
In the journal, Turpin says the work can be seen as "an essay on male beauty, a chauvinistic screed, a sports memoir, a eugenics manifesto, a description of New
York daily life, an anecdotal history of longevity, or a pseudoscientific tract," and warns that it can be “eyebrow-raising."
"Readers should prepare to encounter a more-than-typically self-contradictory Whitman; his primary claims tilt from visionary to reactionary, commonsensical to nonsensical, egalitarian to racist, pacific to bloodthirsty -- and back again," he says.
"Guard your manly power, your health and strength, from all hurts and violations," urges Whitman in one article. "This is the most sacred charge you will ever have in your keeping. To you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of fortune, idler, the same advice. Up! The world (perhaps you now look upon it with pallid and disgusted eyes) is full of zest and beauty for you, if you approach it in the right spirit! Out in the morning!"

Most of the above is taken pretty much directly from http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/revealed-walt-whitman-penned-eyebrow-raising-guide-to-manly-health-and-its-available-online/

A good place to begin is with the .pdf Introduction to Walt Whitman's "Manly Health and Training," written by Zachary Turpin, the man who discovered this unseen work.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2205&context=wwqr

For "Manly Health and Training, With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions"by "Mose Velsor," you can download the full text in .pdf format.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2210&context=wwqr

Turns out there are masses of prose and poetry yet to be located by America's greatest poet. This failed to thrill me, despite its great possibilities, but may be of some interest to others. A few excerpts:

Manly health! Is there not a kind of charm – a fascinating magic
in the words? We fancy we see the look with which the phrase is met
by many a young man, strong, alert, vigorous, whose mind has always
felt, but never formed in words, the ambition to attain to the perfection
of his bodily powers -- has realized to himself that all other goods of
existence would hardly be goods, in comparison with a perfect body,
perfect blood—no morbid humors, no weakness, no impotency or
deficiency or bad stuff in him; but all running over with animation and
ardor, all marked by herculean strength, suppleness, a clear complexion,
and the rich results (which follow such causes) of a laughing voice,
a merry song morn and night, a sparkling eye, and an ever-happy soul!

(Give me some men who are stout-hearted men, etc., because they are the
basis of the national strength and character.)

It is, in our view, indispensably necessary that a man should be a fine animal -- sound and vigorous.... Almost everything else is attended to but the animal part of a man -- as if that were something to be ashamed of and repressed.

And as to real viciousness, let no one suppose that it is confined to
any one class of the community, or is any more to be found in those
who "lead a gay life," than in those who keep demure faces, and are
supposed to be lawful and orthodox -- that is to say, the latter, in most
cases, add hypocrisy to the natural sins of man, and to the private
indulgence in the same.

(What did he mean by that? Seems more like a primordial use of the word rather than as code. The etymology of the current usage has probably been done to death, but I've not pursued the question.

Anyway, in the book there is lots of promotion of exercise. A brisk cold bath in the morning, deep breaths in front of a newly opened window to embrace the fresh, cold air. Then breakfast and off for a jaunty walk to work. That kind of thing. He likes rowing. He likes running. His idea is that a little water is best to drink, maybe some mild beer or wine on occasion, but nothing hot, nothing in excess, and no soda. His ideal diet is almost entirely red meat, preferably beef but perhaps mutton.

He does not get very explicit about retaining one's natural vital energies as a youth in order to produce better children a few years later. Warns against syphilis and other consequences that can come from wasting one's substance with hoards of available women of no consequence or quality.

The idea seems to be a roaring, exuberant lust for live. "Behold, be at ease with me," he once wrote, "for I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lusty as nature." There is or was in the SF Bay Area a school of erotic massage and sexual manipulation called "The Body Electric," taking its name from one of his poems....

While he was writing these columns, collected now for the first time, he was in the process of moving from the failed first edition of "Leaves of Grass" and the even more greatly failed second edition, to creating the third and largely expanded form of his wild embrace of the country, the land, the people, and rather explicitly, hot young men. It is there that the Calamus poems appear, a set of male love songs and discussions, some of which were written earlier as "Live Oak with Moss."

Not clear in my brief surfing today, but one influence on this move toward more explicit manly romance may be Fred Vaughan, a young man who lived with Whitman in the late 1850s.

The Live Oak poems are online:
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00154.html

Alan Helms comments by way of introduction:
Clearly, the poet suffered some crisis of identity beginning in 1858, such that he felt the need to test other outlets, social or sexual. Whitman probably began "Live Oak," his most homoerotic poetic sequence, late in 1858… during this same period that Whitman "regularly socialized with a group of young male friends -- "the beautiful young men?" -- dubbed the "Fred Gray Association" after one of their principals.

Not sure what that question mark is doing there, but isn't it nice to know there was an American gay group before there were "friends of Dorothy"? And you do know that is reported as a term NOT related to anyone from Kansas, right?

From the Live Oak sequence:

For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the
      same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was
      inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast -- And that
      night I was happy.

[cannonmc]

Blimey, that's almost a book in itself 

The discovery did make our radio news today

[JACK777]

There is so much to learn