A “rollicking” anti-lawyer revenge fantasy by Walt Whitman, which challenges previously held ideas about the American poet’s transition from prose to poetry, has been found in the archives of a Victorian New York Sunday newspaper. Though published anonymously, the book matches a detailed synopsis in the poet’s notebook for a project academics had thought abandoned. 
 
 Walt Whitman revealed as author of 'Manly Health' guide Read more 
 
 Entitled The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, the book has just been published free online by the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. Announcing the discovery unearthed in Whitman materials held at the Library of Congress, Ed Folsom, editor of the journal, said the discovery would change everything previously known about the author’s early writing career. “Now we see that the fiction and poetry were mingling in ways we never before knew,” he said. 
 
 Zachary Turpin of the University of Houston discovered the novel in Manhattan-based newspaper the Sunday Dispatch. Set in New York, it was serialised in 1852 and written at the same time as the poet began work on his landmark epic poem Leaves of Grass, published three years later. 
 
 Described by Turpin as “a fun, rollicking, creative, twisty, bizarre little book”, Jack Engle is a classic rags-to-riches orphan’s story about a corrupt lawyer, Mr Covert, who tries to trick his ward Martha out of her inheritance. Jack, who works for Covert, sets out to save his fellow orphan and in the process discovers his fate is tied up with hers. In true Dickensian style, Whitman appears to settle old scores in the book: the writer’s father was also swindled by a New York lawyer. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest The announcement of Whitman’s novel 
 
 Turpin found the 36,000-word novel as he ploughed through the prolific author’s “odds and ends” in the Integrated Catalog of Walt Whitman’s Literary Manuscripts, a comprehensive list of the poet’s surviving papers, jottings, manuscript drafts, scraps and notebooks. Among the scraps, a series of character names appeared: Covert, Jack Engle, Wigglesworth and Smytthe. Painstaking detective work led him to a tiny notice from 1852 in the New York Daily Times (now the New York Times) advertising the serialisation in the Sunday Dispatch of an autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle. 
 
 “Something about it just seemed right,” the academic said. “The name Jack Engle. The year. The newspaper (to which we know Whitman had contributed before).” The clincher came when he matched the character names from Whitman’s notebook with those in the published story. “I couldn’t believe that, for a few minutes, I was the only person on Earth who knew about this book.” 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest The opening of The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle. Photograph: Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 
 
 The discovery is significant not only for its rarity. The extent of Whitman’s prose fiction was previously unknown. The book reveals he grappled with a desire to find the right form in which to express his ideas. “The Whitman we see in Jack Engle is not yet the confident, committed poet we now take him to have always been,” Turpin explained. “It is during this vital time that he’s experimenting, trying on different genres and modes of writing, looking for one that’s ample and expansive enough to express what [Ralph Waldo] Emerson would call ‘the infinitude of the private man’.” 
 
 Folsom agreed the novel revealed Whitman’s struggle with form and that it gives a precise time for his move into poetry. In chapter 19, the plot comes to an abrupt end as Jack wanders through a graveyard and the plots of the buried merge into endless lost life stories. As he contemplates these lost plots, Jack feel the grass covering his own face. Folsom said: “I sense at this moment Whitman is discovering why conventional plots will no longer serve for the kind of writing he feels he has to accomplish, and this novel thus lets us experience the moment in the process of Whitman’s development when he realises fiction simply will not serve the kind of creative work he will devote the rest of his life to.” 
 
 A revival in Whitman’s work may be due. Prized for his originality, compassion, idealism and democratic patriotism, the poet saw himself as a prophet for what the US might become. “The Whitman of the early 1850s is absolutely ablaze,” said Turpin, who has form in finding unusual lost works by Whitman. Last year, he discovered a book-length guide to “manly health” by the poet, which tackled everything from virility to foot care and exercise. Hinting that more may be mined from the archives, Turpin added: “This new novel may also indicate that he didn’t give up prose. God knows – he could have, and probably did, write several more novels, if not many more than that. For all we know, they could be hiding in plain sight. Exciting, isn’t it?” ||||| A simple meat diet, no sweets, fried food or even vegetables, a brisk leap out of bed in the mornings and not exhausting oneself “continually among women”. A 150-year-old self-help guide written by one of the United States’ most revered poets, Walt Whitman, has been rediscovered, offering some unique advice to 19th-century American man on how to obtain a more “noble physique” – and some of it wouldn’t seem so out of place today. 
 
 Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training” is a 47,000-word treatise on how to be a real man, a work that had been long forgotten since it appeared in 13 weekly instalments in a long defunct New York newspaper over the autumn of 1858. In long and sometimes rambling prose, the poet extols the virtues of fresh air, of good footwear, of naked sunbathing and even of facial hair. A beard, said Whitman, is preferable in a man as “a great sanitary protection to the throat”. Too much “mere repetition” of sex, however, is to be avoided as that will produce only sickly, weedy children. 
 
 Dubbed “America’s poet”, Whitman was born in Long Island in 1819, and left school at 11 to start work as an office boy in a newspaper. He went on to become a prolific poet, essayist and journalist. 
 
 It was while looking through the work Whitman had produced under his journalistic pen names that University of Houston doctorate student Zachary Turpin found a single reference to “Manly Health” by Mose Velsor, and ordered the microfilm of the newspaper, the New York Atlas, from his library. By the time it turned up Turpin had forgotten all about it but managed to find an old microfilm player and was astonished to find the huge series, which adds greatly to the cache of Whitman’s known work, much of which has been lost down the years, buried in old newspapers thought too parochial to be digitised. Here he found Whitman, who was a middle-aged man at the time, urging the reader: “To you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of fortune, idler, the same advice. Up! … Out in the morning! 
 
 “America has mentality enough, but needs a far nobler physique.” And “there is no doubt, as things now are, among the young men of modern civilised life, in cities, that a healthy manly virility seems to be almost lost – seems to have given place to a morbid, almost insane, pursuit of women, especially of the lowest ranges of them, for the mere repetition of the sensual pleasure. 
 
 “A man that exhausts himself continually among women is not fit to be, and cannot be, the father of sound and manly children,” he states. “They will be puny and scrofulous – a torment to themselves and to those who have the charge of them.” 
 
 Whitman, who found a surprising cult status as a plot device in the massively successful US TV series Breaking Bad, was gay, his poetry often suffused with homoerotic imagery. This series, said Whitman expert Ed Folsom, a University of Iowa English professor and editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, was written when the poet was struggling to make ends meet after his book Leaves of Grass was failing to sell and at a period where little is known about his life. “I see it as kind of a hymn to the male body – a love song to the male body,” Folsom told the Houston Chronicle. 
 
 Perhaps the view that might jar most with modern health and environmental concerns is Whitman’s view on diet – although not completely as he does advocate excluding pies and sugar. “In our view, if nine-tenths of all the various culinary preparations and combinations, vegetables, pastry, soups, stews, sweets, baked dishes, salads, things fried in grease, and all the vast array of confections, creams, pies, jellies, &c, were utterly swept aside from the habitual eating of the people, and a simple meat diet substituted in their place – we will be candid about it, and say in plain words, an almost exclusive meat diet – the result would be greatly, very greatly, in favour of that noble-bodied, pure-blooded and superior race we have had a leaning toward, in these articles of ours.” 
 
 The University of Iowa-based Walt Whitman Quarterly Review has published the entire 13-part series online – together with an introductory essay by Turpin. 
 
 Whitman often expressed anxiety about his work vanishing. “Some day I’ll die,” he told a friend, Horace Traubel. “Maybe surprise you all by a sudden disappearance: then where’ll my book be? That’s the one thing that excites me: most authors have the same dread – the dread that something or other essential that they have written may somehow become side-tracked, lost – lost forever.” 
 
 Happily for Whitman, this is one work which has been restored. ||||| achary Turpin, a University of Houston graduate student, talks about the poet Walt Whitman at his home, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017, in Houston. Turpin recently discovered a previously unknown novella by Whitman. 
 
 achary Turpin, a University of Houston graduate student, talks about the poet Walt Whitman at his home, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017, in Houston. Turpin recently discovered a previously unknown novella by Whitman. 
 
 Photo: Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle ||||| Sherman Alexie read hundreds, maybe thousands, of poems last year while editing the 2015 edition of Best American Poetry, an annual anthology that comes out Tuesday. Just over six dozen of them made the final cut, including “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” by Yi-Fen Chou, 20 brief, cynical lines on the absurdity of desire. 
 
 But after Alexie had chosen the poem for the collection, he promptly got a note from the author, who turned out not to be the rueful, witty Chinese American poet he’d imagined while reading the piece. 
 
 It was written by Michael Derrick Hudson of Fort Wayne, Ind., a genealogist at the Allen County Public Library who, given his field of expertise, could probably easily explain that he is not of Asian descent. 
 
 Hudson, who is white, wrote in his bio for the anthology that he chose the Chinese-sounding nom de plume after “The Bees” was rejected by 40 different journals when submitted under his real name. He figured that the poem might have a better shot at publication if it was written by somebody else. 
 
 “If this indeed is one of the best American poems of 2015, it took quite a bit of effort to get it into print, but I’m nothing if not persistent,” reads his unabashed explanation. 
 
 Anecdotally, Hudson’s calculation was correct. The literary journal Prairie Schooner, one of nine places to receive a submission from “Yi-Fen Chou,” accepted “The Bees” and three other poems for its Fall 2014 issue. The poem was referred to Best American Poetry, where Alexie came across it, and wound up in the collection, where Brooklyn-based writer and snarky Tumblr poetry-commentator Jim Behrle found it and posted it to his site. 
 
 In a matter of about a day, the scandal was all over “Poetry Twitter,” which can be just as rancorous and swift to outrage as regular Twitter, but with a wider vocabulary. And, perhaps because of its Rachel Dolezal-esque tangle of questions about identity, authenticity, political correctness and “affirmative action,” it didn’t take much longer for the wider world to notice. 
 
 Pen names, as some on Twitter pointed out, have long been a staple of the literary world. And there are plenty of cases in which initials or a pseudonym have worked in the opposite direction — most often for women like Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) and Joanne Rowling (J.K. Rowling), who thought they would be taken more seriously or better reach their target demographic if they didn’t appear to be female. 
 
 But Hudson’s critics said the literary bait-and-switch was fraudulent, racist and fundamentally different from Charlotte Bronte publishing “Jane Eyre” under the name Currer Bell. 
 
 “When you’re doing this from a position of entitlement, you’re appropriating an ethnic identity that’s one, imaginary, and two, doesn’t have access to the literary world,” poet and Chapman University professor Victoria Chang told The Washington Post. “And it diminishes categorically all of our accomplishments. He sort of implies that minorities are published because we’re minorities, not because of our work. That’s just insulting because it strips everything we’ve worked so hard for.” 
 
 Phil Yu, the blogger better known as Angry Asian Man, wrote “if there is such a thing as employing yellowface in poetry, this has to be it.” 
 
 Things only got hairier when Alexie published a defense of his decision to keep the poem on Tuesday. In a blog post for the Best American Poetry Web site, Alexie explained that he read submissions blind, to the extent that he could. He didn’t look up authors to learn more about them or their past work. 
 
 “Each poem will stand or fall on its own merits,” went one of his 11 rules for reading. 
 
 And he acknowledged that he was “more amenable” to the poem because he thought its author was Chinese American. There was nothing explicitly culturally Chinese about the poem — indeed, it seems obsessed with imagery from Western culture — but that only made it more interesting to Alexie. The award-winning Native American author, who has been involved in the “We Need Diverse Books” campaign, said that “Yi-Fen Chou” benefited from a form of minority writer nepotism, just as many white, male writers have long benefited from white, male writer nepotism. 
 
 “I had to keep that pseudonymous poem in the anthology because it would have been dishonest to do otherwise,” he wrote. “If I’d pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I gave the poem special attention because of the poet’s Chinese pseudonym. If I’d pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I was consciously and deliberately seeking to address past racial, cultural, social, and aesthetic injustices in the poetry world.” 
 
 And, most importantly, Alexie wrote, if he pulled the poem, “I think I would have cast doubt on every poem I have chosen for BAP. It would have implied that I chose poems based only on identity.” 
 
 “But that’s not what happened,” he continued. “In the end, I chose each poem in the anthology because I love it. And to deny my love for any of them is to deny my love for all of them.” 
 
 Supporters called Alexie’s response “thoughtful” and “remarkably honest.” Others, including Chang, were unmoved. 
 
 “If someone is fraudulently pretending they’re someone else to benefit from a system that traditionally benefits them, that is not ethical,” she said. “I would have taken it out.” 
 
 Eve Ewing, a writer, teacher and editor studying race and education at Harvard, wrote a long series of tweets disputing Alexie’s point. Promoting people who are usually marginalized is not the same kind of “nepotism” that white writers benefit from, she said. And including a poem whose origins were racist, as Ewing put it, defeats Alexie’s stated goal of making the Best American collection more diverse. 
 
 The controversy, like most controversies, is partly outrage and bluster. Chang acknowledged poetry scandals can feel like a bunch of starved, overlooked authors “sniping” over what meager morsels of fame are afforded to poets. 
 
 But it also raises hard questions for editors, writers and readers: How important is an author to the meaning of a poem? When seeking out diversity, are we looking at names or at content? Is selecting the 75 “best American poems” a fool’s errand? (There seems to be consensus on that last one.) 
 
 And, Alexie pointed out, the scandal had at least one positive takeaway:
– A University of Houston grad student poking around in the Library of Congress' archives stumbled across a long-lost novel from the mid-19th century—and it's a discovery the editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review tells the Houston Chronicle is "going to change everything we thought we knew" about the American poetry legend his publication is named for. English PhD candidate Zachary Turpin's find: Whitman's Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, originally offered to readers in 1852 as a six-piece series in New York's Sunday Dispatch. The New York Times describes the then-anonymously written 36,000-word piece as a "quasi-Dickensian tale" (which it notes shows hints of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, published in 1855) about an orphan, with a bevy of compelling characters and "more than a few unlikely plot twists and jarring narrative shifts." Turpin, who hit Whitman gold in 2015 when he found a lost Whitman advice series, told the Times last year that his obsession with searching for unattributed Whitman works is "kind of a sickness I have in off-hours." This time around, his quest had him plumbing an archive that contained various Whitman notes, drafts, and other miscellaneous records, per the Guardian. One set of scraps featured a bunch of character names, including "Jack Engle," and when Turpin plugged those names into databases of Victorian-era newspapers, up popped a tiny Times ad for the upcoming Engle serial set to appear in the Dispatch, which Whitman was known to have written for. "I couldn't believe that, for a few minutes, I was the only person on Earth who knew about this book," Turpin says. Read the story at the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. (A husband-and-wife team identified a Whitman poem in 2014.)