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."


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