April 24 '681
To Mr. Hotten,
I am glad to hear you are having Mr. Conways potograph engraved in place of the bad
print now in the book.2 If a faithful presentation of
that photograph can be given it will satisfy me well—of course it should be
reproduced with all its shaggy, dappled, rough-skinned character & not attempted
to be smoothed, or prettyfied—(if in time I send the following
hints)—let the costume be kept very simple & broad, & rather kept down
too, little as there is of it—preserve the effect of the sweeping lines
making all that fine free angle below the chin—I would suggest not to bring in
so fully the shoulders & bust as the photograph does—make only the
neck,3 the collar with the immediately
neighboring part of the shirt delineated. You will see that the spot at the left
side of the hair, near the temple, is a white blur, & does not belong in the
picture. The eyes part, and all around the eyes, try to re-produce fully &
faithfully, exactly as in the photograph.
I hope you have a good artist at the work. It is perhaps worth your taking special
pains about, both to achieve a successfull picture & likeness, something
characteristic, & as certain to be a marked help to your edition of the book.
Send me an early proof of the engraving—
Thank you for the papers with notices in them4—& for your Academia5 criticism. Please continue to send any special notices. I receive them
safely & promptly. The London Review notice is reprinted here in Littell's
Living Age.6 I should like to know who wrote the piece in the
Morning Star7—it flushed
my friends & myself too, like a sun-dash, brief, hot, & dazzling.
I have several things more to say, & will write again soon8—Also to Mr. Rossetti9 to whom,
meantime, please offer my friendliest, truest regards.10
Notes
- 1. This draft letter is
endorsed, "To Mr. Hotten | went April 25 '68." [back]
- 2. Hotten wrote about the
portrait on April 8, 1868. Whitman first expressed
interest in switching the frontispiece in his March 9,
1868 letter to Hotten. [back]
- 3. At this point in the
draft Whitman crudely sketched a face, or "autoportraiture" (Horace Traubel,
ed., With Walt Whitman in Camden [1906–1996],
1:210). [back]
- 4. Hotten enclosed on April 8, 1868 a number of newspaper notices of the
English edition of Whitman's poems. On April 12,
1868, William Michael Rossetti also sent clippings. [back]
- 5. Rossetti informed Whitman that this review had been composed by a Mr.
Robertson, "a Scotchman of acute intellectual sympathies." Rossetti had restored
the passages "cut out by a less ardent Editor." [back]
- 6.
Littell's Living Age reprinted notices on April 25, 1868,
from the London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art,
and Science (16 [March 21, 1868], 288–289), on June 6, 1868, from
the Saturday Review (25 [May 2, 1868], 589–590),
and on June 12, 1868, from the Athenaeum (April 25, 1868:
585–586); see 9, 4th series (1868), 251–252, 637–640, and
702–703. The critic in The London Review observed:
"Walt Whitman is, indeed, the Turner of poets. Sometimes you find a mere blurred
mass of colour; then an incomprehensible blaze of light; then a piece of
apparent commonplace; and then a picture which overawes the beholder." [back]
- 7. Rossetti also noted that the Morning Star "had
a very handsome notice…but like all literary reviews in that paper a brief
one." [back]
- 8. No other communications
with Hotten are extant. [back]
- 9. Whitman did not reply to
Rossetti's letter of April 12, 1868. [back]
- 10. Whitman deleted the next
line of this draft—"I will think about the American agent too, &
write"—his answer to Hotten's request of April 8,
1868 for the name of "a good agent" in America (Yale; Horace Traubel,
ed., With Walt Whitman in Camden [1906–1996],
4:308). [back]