The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to Joaquin Miller, 18 April 1876
Date: April 18, 1876
Whitman Archive ID: brn.00012
Source: John Hay Library, Brown University. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Ted Genoways (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 7:46. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Kinnaman, Jonathan Y. Cheng, Elizabeth Lorang, Nima Najafi Kianfar, and Nicole Gray
328 Mickle Street1
Camden New
Jersey
April
18—pm—
I have just mailed to you my two Volumes, Centennial Edition. (Pay rec'd by note from Mr Johnston)? Will you kindly send me a Postal card, when you receive them informing me?
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Joaquin Miller was the pen name of
Cincinnatus Heine Miller (1837–1913), an American poet nicknamed "Byron of
the Rockies" and "Poet of the Sierras." In 1871, the Westminster Review described Miller as "leaving out the coarseness
which marked Walt Whitman's poetry" (297). In an entry in his journal dated August 1,
1871, the naturalist John Burroughs recorded Whitman's fondness for Miller's
poetry; see Clara Barrus, Whitman and
Burroughs—Comrades (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1931), 60.
Whitman met Miller for the first time in 1872; he wrote of a visit with Miller
in a July 19, 1872, letter to his former publisher and
fellow clerk Charles W. Eldridge.
Notes:
1. This note, now tipped into an edition of Leaves of Grass held at Brown University, was unsent. Whitman had already drafted this note when he heard via a letter of April 16 that Miller would be coming to Camden in early May. Miller asked Whitman to "lay [the two volumes] to one side and I will call and get them next month." See Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906–1996), 9 vols., 2:139. [back]