Camden
Aug 29
Dear Jack
As I sit here—the weather is now perfect, day & night—I have jotted off the enclosed & send you—(of course use it or not.)1 Your letter arrived with the enclosures. I keep well—go out most every day. I suppose you rec'd the Tribune (27th I think) with your letter in, which I sent you2—& the other papers I occasionally send. No news particular—I sell a book now & then—
No, I have not been to any watering place—they are no company for me—the cities magnificent for their complex play & oceans of eager human faces—But the country or sea for me in some sparse place, old barn & farm house—or bleak sea shore—nobody round—Meanwhile I get along very well here—
Walt
Notes
- 1. Whitman enclosed a note
for inclusion in Burroughs's article, "Nature and the Poets," in which he
discussed his own poetry and quoted John Addington Symonds's opinion that
Whitman "is more thoroughly Greek than any man of modern times!" (Clara Barrus,
Whitman and Burroughs—Comrades [Boston, New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931], 111, also quotes Burroughs's adaptation of the
passage). Whitman reread Symonds's Greek Poets while he
was at Esopus in April (Specimen Days, ed. Floyd Stovall
[New York: New York University Press, 1963], 340). Burroughs's article appeared
in Scribner's Monthly, 19 (December 1879), 285–295,
and later in Pepacton (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and
Company, 1881). [back]
- 2. Burroughs's "Harvest
Time." On August 24, Burroughs mentioned sending a
"Pastoral Letter" to the New York Tribune (Horace
Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Friday, December 7, 1888, 260). [back]