John William Lloyd to Walt Whitman, 1 December 1891
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5 East 63d Street, New York City
12/1/'91.1
Dear Walt Whitman:—
Your book,2 which is in every way most satisfactory, arrived this morning.
Thank you for your promptness, and your kind confidence in sending it before receiving the balance.
I remit with this the $3.40 lacking, and will be grateful if you will notify me of its safe receipt.
Wishing you renewed health and years of life to enjoy it—
J. Wm. Lloyd.Will induce others to purchase your book if I can.
J Wm Lloyd
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Correspondent:
John William Lloyd
(1857–1940) was an American utopian anarchist, founder of The Comradeship
of Free Socialists and the group's magazine, The Free
Comrade. A brief autobiographical note appears in Richard Maurice
Bucke's seminal work, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the
Evolution of the Human Mind (Philadelphia: Innes and Sons, 1905),
describing his various careers—including "hygienic physician,"
homesteader, poultry farmer, and Florida orange-grower—as well as his wide
exposure to world religions and political philosophies (284–285). Lloyd
was the author of several books of poetry, including Wind–Harp Songs (Buffalo, New York: The Peter Paul Book Company,
1895), which contains the ode "Mount Walt Whitman," written on the occasion of
Whitman's death in 1892. In this poem, Lloyd declares, "Ah, Walt, Walt, poet of
Nature, comrade of free men, / Other poets have been Olympian, / But you are
Olympus itself" (35). Lloyd was connected to other Whitman disciples, including
Edward Carpenter, Horace Traubel, and John Johnston, of the Bolton Whitman
Fellowship. Like Carpenter, Lloyd was interested in the study of sexology. Lloyd
was also the author of a sex manual, The Karezza Method or
Magnetation: The Art of Connubial Love (Privately Printed, 1931). For
more information, see Terence S. Kissack, "Whitman and the Shifting Grounds of
the Politics of Homosexuality," in Free Comrades: Anarchism
and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895–1917 (Oakland: AK
Press, 2008), 69–95.
Notes
- 1. This letter is addressed: Walt Whitman, | Camden, | New Jersey. It is postmarked: NEW YORK | DEC 2 | 10 M | H; H; [illegible] 91 | REC'D; CAMDEN, N.J. | DEC 2 | 4PM | 91 | REC'D. [back]
- 2. The 1891–1892 Leaves of Grass was copyrighted in 1891 and published by Phildelphia publisher David McKay in 1892. This volume, often referred to as the "deathbed" edition, reprints, with minor revisions, the 1881 text from the plates of Boston publisher James R. Osgood. Whitman also includes his two annexes in the book. The first annex, called "Sands at Seventy," consisted of sixty-five poems that had originally appeared in November Boughs (1888); while the second, "Good-Bye my Fancy," was a collection of thirty-one short poems taken from the gathering of prose and poetry published under that title by McKay in 1891, along with a prose "Preface Note to 2d Annex." Whitman concluded the 1891–92 volume with his prose essay "A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads," which had originally appeared in November Boughs. For more information on this volume of Leaves, see R.W. French, "Leaves of Grass, 1891–1892, Deathbed Edition," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]