Walt Whitman’s Archives

Abstract This chapter considers how Walt Whitman thought about literary archives. Whitman left behind a strikingly large volume of material, with no orders to executors to destroy manuscripts. The roots of that hoard lie in the writer’s thinking about the material conditions of authorial posterity. The cosmic materialism articulated in Whitman’s poetry declared a kind of eternal existence, influenced by the notion that a writer could anticipate the assaults of time. The poet shaped the preservation of his own literary archive, through his relationship with Horace Traubel. Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden reveals Whitman enacting document transfers, framing his material remains to guide how Traubel would tell his tale. “Walt Whitman’s Archives” traces Whitman’s concern with literary archives in light of recent media archaeological theory, and concludes with thoughts about how knowing the writer’s ideas about literary preservation might influence the work of those curating his archive’s legacy today.