The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Joaquin Miller to Walt Whitman, 27 May 1875
Date: May 27, 1875
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03138
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.
Editorial notes: The annotation, "Joaquin Miller," is in the hand of Walt Whitman. The annotation, "see notes April 21 1888," is in the hand of Horace Traubel.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Kinnaman, Elizabeth Lorang, Ashley Lawson, Eder Jaramillo, John Schwaninger, Caterina Bernardini, Marie Ernster, Amanda J. Axley, and Stephanie Blalock
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REVERE HOUSE,
BOSTON.
May 27, 75
My dear Walt Whitman
Your kind letter1 is received and the sad news of your ill health2 makes this pleasant weather [even?] seem tiresome and out of place. I had hoped to find you the same hale and whole man I had met in New York a few years go and now I shall perhaps find you [bearing?] you a staff and full of pain and torture. However my dear friend as you have lived from within and nor from without I am sure you will be able to bear whatever comes with that beautiful faith and philosophy you have ever given us in your great and immortal chants.
I am coming to you [really?] soon, as you request; but I cannot say to day or yet tomorrow for I am in the midst of work and am not altogether my own master. But I will come and we will talk it all over together. In the meantime remember that whateer befalls you you have the perfect love and sympathy of many if not all of the noblest and loftiest natures of the two hemispheres. Till I see you my dear friend and fellow toiler goodbye
Yours [fitfully?]
Joaquin Miller
Correspondent:
Joaquin Miller was the pen name of
Cincinnatus Heine Miller (1837–1913), an American poet nicknamed "Byron of
the Rockies" and "Poet of the Sierras." In 1871, the Westminster Review described Miller as "leaving out the coarseness
which marked Walt Whitman's poetry" (297). In an entry in his journal dated August 1,
1871, the naturalist John Burroughs recorded Whitman's fondness for Miller's
poetry; see Clara Barrus, Whitman and
Burroughs—Comrades (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1931), 60.
Whitman met Miller for the first time in 1872; he wrote of a visit with Miller
in a July 19, 1872, letter to his former publisher and
fellow clerk Charles W. Eldridge.
Notes:
1. This letter has not been located. [back]
2. Whitman suffered a stroke in 1873 that left him partially paralyzed and recovering for several years. [back]