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Walt Whitman to John Burroughs, 3 August [1881]

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Your postal of 29th rec'd​ —I am here for a few days, after spending a week down on Long Island, mostly at West Hills and Cold Spring, my parents' places of nativity—& my own place.1 Dr Bucke has been with me—he has return'd​ to Canada—I am about as usual—I go on to B.​ before long, about the book—

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Notes

  • 1. Whitman met Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke and Thomas Nicholson in Jersey City on July 23, and went to Woodside, Long Island, where he stayed with Helen and Arthur Price until July 28. He spent the following four days at West Hills near Huntington. On August 1 he went to New York City, where he stayed with Edgar M. Smith, listed in the directory as a secretary, until August 6 (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). See also Specimen Days (ed. Floyd Stovall [New York: New York University Press, 1963], 273). In The Long Islander, on August 5, a lengthy article appeared on the poet by Mary E. Wager-Fisher, who drew upon an earlier piece in Wide Awake Pleasure Book, 6 (February 1878), 109–115, in which she was greatly indebted to Whitman. In an adjacent column of the same issue of the newspaper was a report titled "Walt Whitman in Huntington." [back]
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