431 Stevens st. / cor West. / Camden, / N. Jersey,
Dec. 5.1
My dear Reid,2
Hasn't this got vim enough—from your point of view, even as editor of
the paper—to make you print it in the Tribune?3
I am still tediously invalided here—but have not at all given up the hope of getting out of the woods, & doing some work yet.
When you come to Philadelphia, try to come over & see me.4
Walt Whitman
Notes
- 1. The letter is dated
"1874," evidently by Reid. [back]
- 2. Whitelaw Reid
(1837–1912) was the editor of the New York Tribune
from 1872 to 1905. He met Whitman in the hospitals during the Civil War. Of his
relations with the poet Reid later observed: "No one could fail then [during the
War] to admire his zeal and devotion, and I am afraid that at first my regard
was for his character rather than his poetry. It was not till long after 'The
Leaves of Grass' period that his great verses on the death of Lincoln conquered
me completely"; see Charles N. Elliot, Walt Whitman as Man,
Poet and Friend (Boston: R. G. Badger, Gorham Press, 1915), 213, and
Studies in Bibliography, 8 (1956),
242–249. [back]
- 3. Reid apparently did not
publish this unidentified article. [back]
- 4. Seemingly in a lost
letter to Reid, Whitman had protested what he considered a slurring reference to
his health in a news item in the Tribune. In apologizing
on December 22, 1874, Reid promised to "have a
paragraph within a day or two, which will I think relieve you of the idea that
we had any such intention." A complimentary notice appeared in the issue of
December 26, 1874; In his January 7, 1875 letter
to Ellen O'Connor, Whitman referred to this notice as "the most flourishing puff
yet given me—& from them!" [back]