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Harry Stafford to Walt Whitman, 29 January 1878

About This Item

  • Title: Harry Stafford to Walt Whitman, 29 January 1878
  • Date: January 29, 1878
  • Creator(s): Harry Stafford
  • Whitman Archive ID: loc.04007
  • Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Contributors to digital file: Eder Jaramillo Alicia Bones Vince Moran Nicole Gray Stefan Schöberlein Elizabeth Lorang
  • Cite this page: Stafford, Harry. "Harry Stafford to Walt Whitman, 29 January 1878." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 04 December 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: loc.04007.xml (TEI)
 loc_vm.00230.jpg Kirkwood N.J.​ Jan​ 29th–78 Walt Whitman

Dear sir!1 would you oblige me by bringing me one of your books containing the "Poem on the death of ex-President Lincoln?" If so you will oblige your true friend. I wish it for a particular purpose.

Yours and etc., H. Stafford  loc_vm.00229.jpg

Notes

  • 1. Walt Whitman met the 18-year-old Harry Lamb Stafford (1858–1918) in 1876, beginning a relationship which was almost entirely overlooked by early Whitman scholarship, in part because Stafford's name appears nowhere in the first six volumes of Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden—though it does appear frequently in the last three volumes, which were published only in the 1990s. Whitman occasionally referred to Stafford as "My (adopted) son" (as in a December 13, 1876, letter to John H. Johnston), but the relationship between the two also had a romantic, erotic charge to it. In 1883, Harry married Eva Westcott. For further discussion of Stafford, see Arnie Kantrowitz, "Stafford, Harry L. (b.1858)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
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