Intro
Walt Whitman wrote a lot. Not only did he write a boat load of poetry; he also kept revising his work and issuing it in new editions throughout his life. That's what he did with his most famous book, the poetry collection Leaves of Grass.
The Walt Whitman Archive is another big project of the Digital Humanities. It's a huge repository of Whitman's work, and it includes all the published editions of Leaves of Grass. What's so useful about having all of these editions in one place on the web? Well, this archive allows Digital Humanists to compare and contrast different versions and revisions of Whitman's work.
Whitman grouped a number of his poems in the collection under the heading "Leaves of Grass" (yup, the same as the title of the book). In each edition of the book, he revised and added to this cluster of poems. Let's look at the first two poems in this cluster in two different editions—the 1867 edition and the 1871-72 edition:
Quote
Quote 1:
THERE was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look'd upon, that object he be-
came;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a
certain part of the day, or for many years, or
stretching cycles of years.
Quote 2:
I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world,
and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at an-
guish with themselves, remorseful after deeds
done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children,
dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate.
Analysis
Notice anything interesting?
Yeah, the second poem is a lot darker than the first. We're talking about the "sorrows of the world" here, "secret convulsive sobs," and the "mother misused by her children." None of that is in the first stanza of the first poem.
So that means that Whitman drastically revised the "Leaves of Grass" cluster of poems in the 1871-72 edition. He re-wrote them to shift emphasis onto darker themes and concerns. By allowing us to look at these two versions side by side, the digital archive of Whitman's poetry makes our work as literary scholars that much easier.