With Walt Whitman in Camden: A Digital Edition
Encoding Guidelines
Traubel Tags
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If you encounter anything that seems to defy the markup scheme as it stands, first see if you can somehow adapt the tags to fit the situation. If it brings up a significant theoretical issue, or if you simply have a practical question, make a log in the notes and send an e-mail detailing it to Allison so that we can either answer your question or bring up and discuss the issue in lab.
Here is a recent example that resulted in some changes to the markup scheme. It is a letter from Ernest Rhys to Walt Whitman that includes a poem that he wrote for his birthday. Instead of postscript, we decided to characterize this as an "enclosure," and then mark up the text as a poem.:
<back>
<div1 type="enclosure">
<lg1 type="poem">
<head type="main-authorial">TO WALT WHITMAN On his 69th Birthday</head>
<lg2 type="stanza">
<l>Here health I bring you in one draught of song</l>
<l>Caught in my rhymster's cup from earth's delight</l>
<l>Where English fields are green the whole year long,—</l>
<l>The wine of might</l>
<l>That the new—come Spring distills most sweet and strong</l>
<l>In the viewless avis alembic wrought too fine for sight</l>
</lg2>
<lg2 type="stanza">
<l>Now shall al pain be gone for this one day,</l>
<l>As drinking deep of this brimm'd wassail cup,</l>
<l>You feel the years uncoil and their travailing pass away,</l>
<l>Till, ere you drink it up,</l>
<l>Again the sun's quick fires you feel pulse brainword through</l>
<l>the blood</l>
<l>Again, as when in youth they pulse making the world seem good.</l>
</lg2>
<lg2 type="stanza">
<l>For this the Magic wine,</l>
<l>That, tasted by the chosen lips, makes Life as long as</l>
<l>Thought,—</l>
<l>Elixir this long sought,</l>
<l>Filled of the sun and the wind and all green growing things,</l>
<l>The salt of the sea and the sweet of the earth,</l>
<l>And the potencies of death and birth,—</l>
<l>That tasted once makes men as gods and the common world</l>
<l>divine.</l>
</lg2>
</lg1>
</div1>
</back>
The Whitman Archive Guidelines go into more detail about marking up poetry (since they deal primarily with poetry manuscripts).