The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: John Townsend Trowbridge to Walt Whitman, 30 April 1875
Date: April 30, 1875
Whitman Archive ID: loc.01967
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.
Editorial note: The annotation, "see notes Aug 29 & 30, '88," is in the hand of Horace Traubel.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Kinnaman, Elizabeth Lorang, Eder Jaramillo, Ashley Lawson, John Schwaninger, Caterina Bernardini, Marie Ernster, Paige Wilkinson, Amanda J. Axley, and Stephanie Blalock
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Arlington, Mass.
Apr. 30, 1875.
My Dear Friend,
I think I have all of your books (2 or 3 Editions of some) except the last,1—specified in my former note,2—which [alone?] I intended to ask for. That might be sent by mail. I write this because in your card you speak of sending me books, & because I really desire only one.
I still go back occasionally to the old "Leaves of Grass" & find in them the same unfailing freshness & power, which repeated readings in no wise dull to the sense—a test which only master studies in literature can stand. They seem very great to me. I am thankful for them.
Faithfully yours
J. T. Trowbridge
Walt Whitman—
Correspondent:
John Townsend Trowbridge (1827-1916)
was a novelist, poet, author of juvenile stories, and antislavery reformer.
Though Trowbridge became familiar with Whitman's poetry in 1855, he did not meet
Whitman until 1860 when the poet was in Boston overseeing the Thayer and
Eldridge edition of Leaves of Grass. He again met Whitman
in Washington in 1863, when Trowbridge stayed with Treasury Secretary Salmon P.
Chase in order to gather material for his biography, The Ferry
Boy and the Financier (Boston: Walker and Wise, 1864); he described
their meetings in My Own Story (Boston: Houghton and
Mifflin, 1903), 360–401, with recollections of noted persons. On December
11, 1863, Trowbridge presented to Chase Emerson's letter recommending Whitman;
see Emerson's letter from January 10, 1863. Though
Trowbridge was not an idolator of Whitman, he wrote to William D. O'Connor in
1867: "Every year confirms my earliest impression, that no book has approached
the power and greatness of this book, since the Lear and Hamlet of Shakespeare"
(Rufus A. Coleman, "Trowbridge and O'Connor," American
Literature, 23 [1951–52], 327). For Whitman's high opinion of
Trowbridge, see Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906–1996), 3:506. See
also Coleman, "Trowbridge and Whitman," PMLA, 63 (1948),
262–273.
Notes:
1. The fifth edition of Leaves of Grass was published by J. S. Redfield in 1871. For more information on this edition, see Luke Mancuso, "Leaves of Grass, 1871–72 Edition," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
2. This letter has not been located. [back]