Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to John Burroughs, 3 August [1881]

Date: August 3, 1881

Whitman Archive ID: loc.01138

Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

Notes for this letter were created by Whitman Archive staff and/or were derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), and supplemented or updated by Whitman Archive staff.

Contributors to digital file: Kirsten Clawson, Nima Najafi Kianfar, Stefan Schöberlein, and Nicole Gray



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5 East 65th Street
New York City
Evn'g Aug 3d

Your postal of 29th rec'd—I am here for a few days, after spending a week down on Long Island, mostly at West Hills and Cold Spring, my parents' places of nativity—& my own place.1 Dr Bucke has been with me—he has return'd to Canada—I am about as usual—I go on to B. before long, about the book—


W W


Notes:

1. Whitman met Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke and Thomas Nicholson in Jersey City on July 23, and went to Woodside, Long Island, where he stayed with Helen and Arthur Price until July 28. He spent the following four days at West Hills near Huntington. On August 1 he went to New York City, where he stayed with Edgar M. Smith, listed in the directory as a secretary, until August 6 (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). See also Specimen Days (ed. Floyd Stovall [New York: New York University Press, 1963], 273). In The Long Islander, on August 5, a lengthy article appeared on the poet by Mary E. Wager-Fisher, who drew upon an earlier piece in Wide Awake Pleasure Book, 6 (February 1878), 109–115, in which she was greatly indebted to Whitman. In an adjacent column of the same issue of the newspaper was a report titled "Walt Whitman in Huntington." [back]


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