Correction: In the print edition of the May 4 article “A Diet More Than Grass,” The Daily Iowan incorrectly identified a subject of a photo as graduate student Zachary Turpin. The photo is of Tom Keegan, the head of digital scholarship and publishing studio at the UI Libraries. The DI regrets the error.
By Anna Onstad-Hargrave
The world now knows writer Walt Whitman was one of the first advocates for the paleo diet, thanks to a journalistic series recently rediscovered through an online database after being misattributed for more than 150 years.
The journals were uncovered when University of Houston graduate student Zachary Turpin compared an advertisement in the New York Atlas under the name of Mose Velsor with a handwritten note from Walt Whitman. He discovered the two were nearly identical.
“Let the main part of the diet be meat, to the exclusion of all else,” Whitman wrote in Manly Health and Training, a nearly 47,000-word journalist series.
Mose Velsor was one of many pseudonyms Whitman used and is the reason the journalistic series were missing for so long, Turpin said.
“It’s the idea of personal perfectibility, health, vigor, daily happiness, and connection with your happiest self,” he said.
Turpin noted that Whitman’s suggestions in Manly Health overlapped with some of what he wrote in Leaves of Grass, a poetry collection Whitman spent most of his professional life writing and rewriting, revising it numerous times until his death.
Turpin said that in Manly Health Whitman advocated for daily bathing, growing a beard, eating lean meat, and wearing comfortable shoes — all of which he attributed to a healthy lifestyle.
David Reynolds, an English professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said he agreed with Turpin’s assessment of Manly Health.
“There’s a kind of health-nut thing about Leaves of Grass already,” Reynolds said. “This series sort of codifies it and expands on it, giving us a real regimen.”
Turpin published Whitman’s Manly Health in the UI’s Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, which has been published at the university for 33 years, Editor Ed Folsom said.
“We have published a lot of important Whitman discoveries during those years, but everyone now knows about this particular discovery because we recently became an online-only open-access journal,” Folsom said.
He said most of Whitman’s poetry, around the time the journalistic series was published, was focused on the male body and male-male affection. Manly Health appeared around the same time as Whitman’s Calamus poems, he said.
“Those poems explored male-male affection and have come to be read as the first articulation of gay identity and the first creation of a diction of male-male love,” Folsom said. “He was beginning those poems at just the time he was writing Manly Health, which is a kind of hymn to the male body.”
Folsom said it is gratifying to see the amount of attention that Turpin’s discovery has gotten. However, he said, the attention will probably “fade in a few days.”
“What is crucial for those of us involved in publishing the journal is that we have demonstrated the power of open-access online academic journals,” he said. “I’m delighted that Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and the University of Iowa are on the cutting edge of demonstrating the potential for new digital platforms in scholarly platforms.”
