Camden1
May 23d
My dear Reid
Couldn't you feel to print the above say for instance in the Bits
of Criticism in next Sunday's Tribune?2
Walt Whitman
Notes
- 1. This letter is endorsed
(in unknown hand): "Not answered." [back]
- 2. At the top of the page
Whitman wrote: "? Under Bits of Criticism | in Sunday Tribune | A defence of Walt
Whitman | From the Philadelphia Press."
Immediately below appeared the editorial from the Press
of May 22. According to Whitman's Commonplace Book, Whitman sent similar letters
(lost) to the editors of the Boston Herald (see the
letter from Whitman to William D. O'Connor of May 25,
1882), the Boston Globe, the Boston Post, and to Crosley Stuart Noyes, an old friend and the
editor of the Washington Evening Star (Charles E.
Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.). The Camden Daily Post copied
the article in the Press on May 22. Though the Tribune apparently did not reprint the editorial, it
published on May 15 Whitman's "Emerson's Books, (the Shadows of them)," which
appeared in 1880 in The Literary World (see the letter
from Whitman to John Burroughs of May 9, 1880).
Whitman was supported, not without reservations in some instances, by the
following newspapers: the Philadelphia Times on May
23, the Chicago Inter Ocean on May 22 and 23, the
Chicago Herald on May 23, the New York Home Journal on May 24, the Boston Liberty and the Cambridge (Mass.) Chronicle
on May 27, the Boston Globe on May 28, the Audubon
County (Iowa) Sentinel on May 31(?), and the
Woodstown (N.J.) Register on June 6. He was attacked,
often with hysteria, by the following: the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin on May 23, the Boston Daily
Advertiser on May 24, the Cincinnati Ohio on
May 24, The Christian Intelligencer (quoted in the
New York Tribune on June 4), and the Philadelphia Times on July 17. For the Springfield Republican and the Boston Herald, see the letter from Whitman to O'Connor of May 25, 1882; for The
Critic, see the letter from Whitman to Jeannette L. and Joseph B.
Gilder of June 3, 1882.
[back]