Welcome to the newly redesigned WhitmanWeb site. Please check back frequently as we quality check the translations.
If you have any questions or concerns, see the bottom of this page for our contact information.
"After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains."
WhitmanWeb Project
The website was launched in 2012, featuring Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” in nine languages: English, Chinese, French, German, Persian, Portuguese, Russian (in two versions), Spanish, and Ukrainian. Arabic (in two versions), Malay, Polish, Romanian, Khmer, Kurdish and Filipino translations followed in 2013 and 2014, two versions of translation into the Turkish in 2021, and other languages are expected. The idea behind the project was to have a conversation, across languages, borders, and time zones, about the multiple meanings of this foundational text. For 52 weeks between fall of 2012 and 2013, Professor Ed Folsom, co-director of the Whitman Archive and Christopher Merrill, director of the International Writing Program, exchanged a foreword and an afterword to each section, then posed a question inspired by the reading. The readers answered these in the Comments section of each section, or on the pages of WhitmanWeb’s social media. In 2016 Folsom’s and Merrill’s commentaries were published alongside Whitman’s poem by the University of Iowa Press.
Song of Myself
Each section of “Song of Myself” is presented in English alongside translations in eight other languages, including the first-ever translation into Persian, accompanied by photographs, commentary, discussion questions, and recordings.
Every Atom
Every Atom: Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" takes a collective approach to a close reading of America’s democratic verse epic, first published without a title in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and later titled "Song of Myself" in the 1881 edition.
Whitman and the Civil War
In Whitman and the Civil War—the latest incarnation of the WhitmanWeb—war is the subject, but peace and reconciliation are the themes we will explore week by week.