Skip to main content

Walt Whitman to F. S. Ellis, 7 September [1876]

 loc.02036.001_large.jpg

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  loc.02036.002_large.jpg

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]
Back to top