Walt Whitman to Hiram Corson, 13 April 1886
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328 Mickle street
Camden New Jersey
April 13 '86
My Dear Prof: Carson
Yours rec'd1—The copy of John Burroughs's Notes2 I send to you by same mail with this.—The price is $1 which you may just enclose in envelope & mail to me here—I too enjoy'd the young man's Woodruff's visit to me & talk3—& hoped to have seen you—I am ab't the same in health &c—(nothing at all to brag of)—I read publicly my Death of Abraham Lincoln next Thursday in Phila:
Walt Whitman
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Correspondent:
Hiram Corson (1828–1911) was
a scholar of English literature from Philadelphia, where he taught at Girard
College. While his studies focused mainly on canonical British texts
(Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc.), Corson would also give public readings of
Whitman's verse.
Notes
- 1. See Corson's letter to Whitman on March 26. [back]
- 2. Burroughs's Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person was published in 1867. [back]
- 3. Edwin H. Woodruff (1863–1941), then a member of the staff of the Cornell University Library, was introduced to the poet by Hiram Corson in a letter of March 26, 1886. Two days later he was in Camden (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Earlier, on June 4, 1882, Woodruff had sent Whitman a poem written under his influence and printed in the Cornell Era. Later Woodruff became a professor of law and was dean of the Cornell Law School from 1916 to 1921. See Cornell University, Faculty. Necrology of the Faculty, 1941–1942, 5–7. [back]