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Camden New Jersey U S America
Jan. 22 '841—
Yours of New Year's day rec'd,2 with K's translations3—I send you a little
paper—Yes, I know Edward Carpenter4—I am well as
usual—A severe winter here—have had fine sleigh-rides, & enjoyed
them—or some days on the river, the Delaware, on our powerful steam
ferry-boat, pressing & crashing through the heavy ice.
Walt Whitman
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Correspondent:
Thomas William Hazen Rolleston
(1857–1920) was an Irish poet and journalist. After attending college in
Dublin, he moved to Germany for a period of time. He wrote to Whitman
frequently, beginning in 1880, and later produced with Karl Knortz the first
book-length translation of Whitman's poetry into German. In 1889, the collection
Grashalme: Gedichte [Leaves of
Grass: Poems] was published by Verlags-Magazin in Zurich, Switzerland.
See Walter Grünzweig, Constructing the German Walt Whitman (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1995). For more information on Rolleston, see
Walter Grünzweig, "Rolleston, Thomas William Hazen (1857–1920)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D.
Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes
- 1. This postal card is
addressed: T W Rolleston | 28 Terrassen Ufer | Dresden | Saxony. It is
postmarked: (?) Paid | (?); Dresden (?) ALTST | 62 | 94(?) | 12-IN. [back]
- 2. See the letter from
Rolleston to Whitman of January 1, 1884. [back]
- 3. Whitman sent Knortz's
translations from Leaves of Grass to Rolleston on October
14 (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of
Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). In his
letter of January 1 Rolleston asked Whitman about
Carpenter, whose Towards Democracy (1883) he was reading
(Whitman and Rolleston—A Correspondence, ed.
Horst Frenz [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1951],
81–82). [back]
- 4. Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) was an English
writer and Whitman disciple. Like many other young disillusioned Englishmen, he
deemed Whitman a prophetic spokesman of an ideal state cemented in the bonds of
brotherhood. Carpenter—a socialist philosopher who in his book Civilisation, Its Cause and Cure posited civilization as
a "disease" with a lifespan of approximately one thousand years before human
society cured itself—became an advocate for same-sex love and a
contributing early founder of Britain's Labour Party. On July 12, 1874, he wrote for the first time to Whitman: "Because you
have, as it were, given me a ground for the love of men I thank you continually
in my heart . . . . For you have made men to be not ashamed of the noblest
instinct of their nature." For further discussion of Carpenter, see Arnie
Kantrowitz, "Carpenter, Edward [1844–1929]," Walt Whitman:
An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]