Title: Walt Whitman to the Committee on Invitations, American Institute, 5 August 1871
Date: August 5, 1871
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01695
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), 2:132. 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, Zachary King, and Eric Conrad
Department of Justice
Washington.
Aug 5, 1871
Messrs. George Payton, Chas. E. Burd, and James B. Young, Committee on
Invitations.
Dear Sirs:1
I have read your letter of 1st inst. containing invitation to deliver an appropriate original poem at the opening of the 40th Annual Exhibition of the American Institute, Sept. 7, & stating terms, &c. I accept with pleasure, & shall be ready without fail to deliver the poem at time specified.
Address me here, if any thing further.
1.
The Committee of the American Institute had written on August 1, 1871, "to solicit of you the honor of
a poem on the occasion of its opening, September 7, 1871—with the
privilege of furnishing proofs of the same to the Metropolitan Press for
publication with the other proceedings.…We shall be most happy, of
course, to pay traveling expenses & entertain you hospitably, and pay
$100 in addition."
The newspaper coverage of Walt Whitman's appearance was extensive: the
Washington Daily Morning Chronicle published the
poet's account on September 7, 1871; the New York Evening
Post reprinted the poem, later entitled "After All, Not to Create Only," and called Walt Whitman "a good
elocutionist"; he was also praised in the New York Sun and the Brooklyn Standard; the New York
Tribune printed excerpts from the poem on
September 8, 1871, and later a devastating parody by Bayard Taylor
(reprinted in his Echo Club [2nd ed., 1876],
169–170); the Springfield Republican published
the poem on September 9, 1871. In reply to the criticisms of the poem, Walt
Whitman prepared the following for submission to an unidentified newspaper:
"The N. Y. World's frantic, feeble, fuddled articles
on it are curiosities. The Telegram dryly calls it
the longest conundrum ever yet given to the public" (Yale). See also Horace
Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906–1996),
1:328–329; Emory Holloway, Whitman–An
Interpretation in Narrative (1926), American
Mercury, 18 (1929), 485–486; and Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer (New York: Macmillan, 1955),
433–435.
On September 11, 1871, John W. Chambers,
secretary of the Institute, thanked Walt Whitman "for the magnificent
original poem." [back]