The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to James Knowles, 9 February 1890
Date: February 9, 1890
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03208
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 derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), and supplemented, updated, or created by Whitman Archive staff as appropriate.
Contributors to digital file: Blake Bronson-Bartlett, Ian Faith, Alex Ashland, and Stephanie Blalock
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Camden New Jersey U S America
Feb: 9 1890
Dear Sir
I sent you a little cluster of poemets "Old Age's Echoes" ab't 1st of Nov: last—wh' I suppose you have rec'd—No word rec'd me ab't them—If you can't use them please kindly return the slip copy (it was printed on a slip) to me here,1
respectfully &c:
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman—9 Feb 1890 | as to his verses on | 'Old Age Echoes'?
Correspondent:
James Thomas Knowles
(1831–1908) was the editor of The Nineteenth
Century, a leading British monthly magazine, in which "Fancies at Navesink" was published on August 18, 1885. He was also an
architect and the founder of the Metaphysical Society, dedicated to discovering
common ground between science and religion.
Notes:
1. See Whitman's November 4, 1889, letter to the Canadian physician and psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke, where he mentions submitting "Old Age Echoes." Knowles returned the copy on February 21, 1890. The cluster of poems was eventually published in the March 1891 issue of Lippincott's Magazine. [back]