The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to William J. Linton [August 1875]
Date: [August 1875]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02825
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.
Related item: Whitman wrote this draft in response to the letter by William J. Linton requesting Whitman's assent to the use of an engraving of the poet done by Linton himself in a book to be printed in England. See loc.01803.
Contributors to digital file: Elizabeth Lorang, Kathryn Kruger, Zachary King, Eric Conrad, Alex Kinnaman, Marie Ernster, Erel Michaelis, Amanda J. Axley, and Stephanie Blalock
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You are entirely welcome to use the eng: as you desire. I am about as usual—not any worse. Feel or fancy I feel, relief already as summer wanes—one of my doctors
thinks much of my head trouble the past three mos. is from the sun. I am almost always easier as day departs
Correspondent:
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."