Walt Whitman’s New Health Treatise
Jennifer Schuessler at the New York Times has just now, on April 29, reported the discovery of a major unknown work by Walt Whitman, Manly Health and Training, written in 1858—though some people may object to calling the unknown work “major,” given that Manly Health and Training represents hack journalism of a semi-reputable and decidedly minor sort. Manly Health and Training was a 13-part series on men’s health, for a forgotten newspaper called The New York Atlas, and was plundered partly from pseudo-scientific treatises of the day and was published under a pen-name, “Mose Velsor, of Brooklyn,” and was remembered afterwards by nobody at all. The scholar who discovered it is Zachary Turpin of the University of Houston, and he has reprinted it online at the Walt Whitman Quarterly, with commentary of his own. No one who reads Manly Health and Training will take it to be Whitman’s finest achievement. But I am not sure that, with Whitman, it makes sense to distinguish between major works and minor works. His greatest creation was himself, “Walt Whitman, a kosmos,” which means that everything he wrote that speaks of himself and his language and ideas contributes to the marvelously cosmic and megalomaniacal concept and can hardly be dismissed as minor.
Manly Health and Training plainly speaks of Whitman. The pen-name would have fooled no one back in 1858. There are mad and extravagant sentences in Leaves of Grass and especially in the preface of the first edition, from 1855, which was a prose poem to the United States. And Manly Health and Training begins in the same extravagant manner. The rolling and suspenseful rhythms of the first sentence are somehow magnificent—they subject your breath to intense manipulations—even though he doesn’t say very much: