Brooklyn
Tuesday morning October 1st | 18611
Mr. Lowell,
Dear Sir: The price of "1861," if you print it, is $20. You are at liberty to make any verbal alterations. The envelope is of course to return it in, if you cannot use it.2
Yours truly
W. Whitman
Notes
- 1. The envelope for this
letter bears the address: J. R. Lowell | Atlantic Magazine. [back]
- 2. On October 8, 1861,
Lowell wrote to James T. Fields: "I enclose . . . three [poems] from Walt
Whitman. '1861' he says is $20. the others $8. each"; see M. A. De Wolfe
Howe, ed., New Letters of James Russell Lowell (New York:
Harper, 1932), 102. On October 10, 1861, the editors of the Atlantic Monthly declined "the three poems with which you have favored
us, but which we could not possibly use before their interest,—which is of
the present,—would have passed" (Charles E. Feinberg Collection; Horace
Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden [1906-1996], 9
vols., 2:213). When Horace Traubel asked Whitman in 1888 for the titles of these
poems, he replied: "I don't just remember: I do remember that the idea that
their interest was of the present struck me as being a bit odd: I always have
written with something more than a simply contemporary perspective" (2:213).
"1861" appeared in Drum-Taps (1865). [back]