I thank you heartily for my share in your Custer poem,1 which I have just read. It is splendidly strong and sustained and full of a noble motive. I am especially glad to learn, in such an authoritative way, of your health and vigor.
I wish you would loc.01728.002_large_mflm.jpg take the trouble to let me know when your volume of collected works is to be published and where I can subscribe for it. I have heard that it was to be published by subscription, but have not heard any further details.
My address is now 506 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio, and I would be loc.01728.003_large_mflm.jpg very much obliged if you would spend a moment in letting me know how to get an early copy of the book for which many are looking.
Yours faithfully John Hay loc.01728.004_large_mflm.jpg July 25 '76 Letter from John Hay (Custer poem) slips & paper sent him July 25Correspondent:
John Hay (1838–1905) was
Abraham Lincoln's private secretary and a historian as well as Secretary of
State under Theodore Roosevelt. Hay praised Whitman's "A Death-Sonnet for
Custer" (later entitled "From Far Dakota's Cañons") when it appeared in the
New York Daily Tribune on July 10, 1876. Whitman sent the
1876 Centennial Edition of Leaves of Grass to Hay on
August 1, 1876 (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of
the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C.).