Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to Edmund Yates, 7 May 1873

Date: May 7, 1873

Whitman Archive ID: loc.01578

Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 2:218. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

Contributors to digital file: Kenneth M. Price, Elizabeth Lorang, Kathryn Kruger, Zachary King, and Eric Conrad




Washington, D.C.
May 7, 1873.

My dear Edmund Yates,1

Pardon me for my forgetfulness about the pictures. I send you three, to make it up. I have been putting off every thing—forgetting every thing—till I feel well again—for I am still in a pretty bad way—but shall come round again by-and-by, with the blessing of God—And so, (as Mr. Philp's2 messenger is waiting) I shake hands across—& abruptly bid you good bye, for this time.


Walt Whitman

My address here is Solicitor's Office, Treasury, and shall always be happy to hear from you.


Notes:

1. Edmund Yates (1831–1894) was the drama critic of the London Daily News, a novelist, and the author of several farces. On a lecture tour of the United States in 1872 and 1873, he met Walt Whitman in Washington in March 1873; see Yates' Fifty Years of London Life: Memoirs of a Man of the World (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885), 402, and Doyle's comments on Yates's meetings with Walt Whitman, in The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1902), 8:13–14. In 1868 Yates had reviewed the London edition of Whitman's poem in the Leader; Yates's review was quoted generously in a review cited in Whitman's April 28–May 4, 1868 letter to Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. [back]

2. Mr. Philp was one part of Philp & Solomon booksellers in Washington, D.C. [back]


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