Nebraska professor accidentally found a lost Walt Whitman poem

(Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

last updated 8 January 2015

Wendy Katz, an art historian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, got more than she bargained for while searching through the Library of Congress penny newspaper collection. In a 1942 edition of the New Era, she found a 15-line poem, "To Bryant, the Poet of Nature," signed W.W. "I was literally going through these newspapers page by page and fully expected to find some of [Walt] Whitman's journalism," Katz tells the Lincoln Journal Star. "I didn't expect to find a poem."

The poem was apparently addressed to Whitman's friend, New York Evening Post editor and fellow poet William Cullen Bryant, but proving the author was Whitman involved some detective work, contextual analysis, and luck: Katz's husband, Kenneth Price, is an editor of the Walt Whitman Archive at the UNL's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Other Whitman scholars confirmed Katz's conclusion over the summer. To read the poem and Katz's line of research, visit the Journal Star.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.