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Walt Whitman to Jeannette L. and Joseph B. Gilder, 3 June 1882

Yours of 2d rec'd, with the $10, hereby receipted2

I appreciate the "Dogberry" article not only for its bearing on me & my book—it is the keenest bit of quiet razor-edged literary paragraphing I have read lately3

I have rec'd from Boston the handsomely published "Essays"—hearty thanks to the writer of the criticism last of book on mine & me4—I am at present again well as usual (was quite ill all April & first half of May)—Send me please three copies last Critic

Walt Whitman

Notes

  • 1. This letter is addressed: J L & J B Gilder | Critic office | 30 Lafayette Place | New York City. It is postmarked: Philadelphia | Jun | 3 | 9 PM | Pa. [back]
  • 2. Payment for "Edgar Poe's Significance," which appeared in The Critic on this date; included in Specimen Days, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 230–233. [back]
  • 3. "The Massachusetts Dogberry," an editorial in The Critic on June 3, was indeed a "razor-edged" attack on the Boston censors of Leaves of Grass. [back]
  • 4. Essays from "The Critic" contained Whitman's "Death of Carlyle" and "Death of Longfellow" as well as an anonymous chapter entitled "Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass,'" in which the author judiciously appraised Whitman's poetry as "truly caviare to the multitude," defended the sexual poems, deplored Whitman's "lack of taste" in the use of foreign phrases, and compared him to Richard Wagner. [back]
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