Walt Whitman’s lost advice to America’s men: meat, beards and not too much sex

Rediscovered newspaper columns by poet Walt Whitman despair of a lack of ‘manly virility’ and promote the development of a ‘noble physique’

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.

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