Edmund Gosse to Walt Whitman, 12 December 1873
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The Library,
British Museum.
London.
Dec. 12th 1873.
Dear Sir
When my friend, Mr. Linton1 was here last, I asked him, during one
of our conversations about you, whether I might venture to send you the book I was then
writing, as soon as it came out.2 If he had not encouraged me to do
so, I should hardly have liked to trouble you with it, and yet there is no one living
by whom I am more desirous to be known than by you. The "Leaves of
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of Grass" have become a part of my every-day thought
and experience. I have considered myself as "the new person drawn toward" you;3
I have taken your warning, I have weighed all the doubts and the dangers, and the result
is that I draw only closer and closer to you.
As I write this I consider how little it can matter to you in America, how you are regarded
by a young man in England of whom you have never heard. And yet I cannot believe that you,
the poet of comrades, will refuse
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the sympathy I lay at your feet. In any case I can but thank you for all that I have
learned from you, all the beauty you have taught me to see in the common life of healthy
men and women, and all the pleasure there is in the mere humanity of other people. The
sense of all this was in me, but it was you, and you alone, who really gave it power to
express itself. Often when I have been alone in the company of one or other of my dearest
friends, in the very deliciousness of the sense of
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nearness and sympathy, it has seemed to me that you were somewhere invisibly with us.
Correspondent:
English writer and critic Edmund Gosse
(1849–1928) was born into a small Protestant sect called the Plymouth Brethren. He later cut
ties with that faith and authored the book Father and Son (1907) about his
childhood, which has been characterized as the first psychological biography. After beginning his
career as assistant librarian of the British Museum, Gosse ended his career as librarian of the House
of Lords Library, retiring in 1914.
Notes
- 1. William J. Linton (1812–1897), a British-born wood engraver, came to the United States in 1866 and settled near New Haven, Connecticut. He illustrated the works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and others, wrote the "indispensable" History of Wood-Engraving in America (1882), and edited Poetry of America, 1776–1876 (London, 1878), in which appeared eight of Whitman's poems as well as a frontispiece engraving of the poet. According to his Threescore and Ten Years, 1820 to 1890—Recollections (1894), 216–217, Linton met with Whitman in Washington and later visited him in Camden (which Whitman reported in his November 9, 1873, letter to Peter Doyle): "I liked the man much, a fine-natured, good-hearted, big fellow, . . . a true poet who could not write poetry, much of wilfulness accounting for his neglect of form." [back]
- 2. As yet we have no information about this publication. [back]
- 3. Here, Gosse is referencing the poem "Are you the new person drawn toward me," which first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as number 12 of the "Calamus" cluster. For more information about this poem, see Frederick J. Butler, "Are You the New Person Drawn toward Me? (1860)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]