The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to F. S. Ellis, 7 September [1876]
Date: September 7, 1876
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02036
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 derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), and supplemented, updated, or created by Whitman Archive staff as appropriate.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Kinnaman, Elizabeth Lorang, Kathryn Kruger, Zachary King, Eric Conrad, and Nicole Gray
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Camden, N Jersey—US America
Sept 71—
I send you to-day by mail, to same address as this card, my Volume, Two Rivulets. Please send me word, (by postal card will do,) soon as it reaches you safely
W Whitman
Correspondent:
Frederick Startridge Ellis
(1830–1901) was a London bookseller, publisher, and author who published
the works of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Whitman first wrote to
Ellis on August 12, 1871, to ask if he would
publish Leaves of Grass. Ellis declined, writing in an
August 23 letter that there were poems in Leaves of Grass that "would not go down in England," but
he praised Whitman's poetry and sent him a specially printed copy of Algernon
Charles Swinburne's Songs Before Sunrise.
Notes:
1. The date is confirmed by an entry in Whitman's Commonplace Book (Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). [back]