Attorney General's Office,
Washington,
Jan. 26, 1869.
Dear Mr. Freiligrath:1
I have sent you to-day by ocean mail, a copy of my latest printed Leaves of Grass—not knowing whether you have received the package forwarded for you by a friend2 of mine last November. I should be well pleased indeed to hear from you. My address is,
Walt Whitman,
Washington, D. C.
U. S. America
Notes
- 1. Ferdinand Freiligrath
(1810–1876) was a German poet and translator and friend of Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow. His review in the Augsburg Allgemeinen
Zeitung on April 24, 1868 (reprinted in his Gesammelte Dichtungen [Stuttgart: G. J. Göschen, 1871],
4:86–89), was among the first notices of Walt Whitman's poetry on the
continent. (A translation of the article appeared in the New
Eclectic Magazine, 2 [July 1868], 325–329; see also Gay Wilson
Allen, Walt Whitman Abroad [Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1955], 3–7.) Freiligrath had promised his readers "some translated
specimens of the poet's productions," not a complete translation. A sympathetic
article on Whitman in the New York Sontagsblatt of
November 1, 1868, mentioned Freiligrath's admiration for the American poet. A
translation of this article, which Whitman had a Washington friend prepare, is
now in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman,
1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. [back]
- 2. William D. O'Connor acted as
emissary between Whitman and Freiligrath. Whitman's September 27, 1868 letter to O'Connor indicated that O'Connor had
provided Whitman with Freiligrath's address, and in his October 4, 1868 letter, Whitman asked O'Connor to write a letter to
Freiligrath to follow a package Whitman sent to Freiligrath on November 11,
1868. [back]