The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to Edmund Gosse, 31 December [1884]
Date: December 31, 1884
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02230
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 created by Whitman Archive staff and/or were derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), and supplemented or updated by Whitman Archive staff.
Contributors to digital file: Stefan Schöberlein, Kyle Barton, and Nicole Gray
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328 Mickle Street
Camden New Jersey
Dec: 31.
Dear Mr. Gosse:
I shall be glad to see you—Call about 11 forenoon if convenient —I live less than half a mile from the ferry landing here, crossing from Philadelphia1—
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Sir Edmund William Gosse (1849–1928), English
poet and author of Father and Son (a memoir published in
1907), had written to Whitman on December 12,
1873: "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" (see Horace
Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Friday, June 1, 1888). Gosse reviewed Two
Rivulets in "Walt Whitman's New Book," The Academy, 9 (24
June 1876), 602–603, and visited Whitman in 1885 (see Whitman's letter
inviting Gosse to visit on December 31, 1884, Gosse's December 29, 1884 letter to Whitman, and
The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller [New
York: New York University Press, 1961–1977], 3:384 n80). In a letter to
Richard Maurice Bucke on October 31, 1889, Whitman
characterized Gosse as "one of the amiable conventional wall-flowers of
literature." For more about Gosse, see Jerry F.
King, "Gosse, Sir Edmund (1849–1928)," Walt Whitman:
An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes:
1. On December 29 Gosse asked permission to call on Whitman to deliver "to you in person the messages which I bring from Mr. Swinburne and other common friends in England." Although Whitman vaguely recorded the visit as on January "7th or before" in his Commonplace Book, Gosse called on Saturday morning, January 3. The Philadelphia Daily News of January 6 reported the visit in detail, with additions supplied by Whitman. Gosse informed the poet that recently Tennyson had "delighted a considerable audience with recitations for half an hour from 'Whitman's Leaves of Grass.'" Gosse described the visit in Critical Kit-Kats (1896), 95–111. [back]