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Harry Stafford to Walt Whitman, 13 November 1877

 loc_vm.00095.jpg Dear friend Walt—

Father has been very sick and wishes to see you very badly,1 he toled​ me to stop and tell you Yesterday but I did not find you in when I was there so I thought that I would write a few lines to you; the first thing that he asked me when I got home was if I had seen you. We thought  loc_vm.00096.jpg he was dying Saturday night for a time. I had to go after the doctor about 12 o'clock you must come down as soon as you get this letter, come down on the 4 train from Phila​ tomorrow if you can any how I will have to close for the present.

Ever yours Harry Stafford  loc_vm.00097.jpg  loc_vm.00098.jpg  loc_gt.00047.jpg  loc_gt.00048.jpg

Notes

  • 1. Walt Whitman met the 18-year-old Harry Lamb Stafford (1858–1918) in 1876, beginning a relationship which was almost entirely overlooked by early Whitman scholarship, in part because Stafford's name appears nowhere in the first six volumes of Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden—though it does appear frequently in the last three volumes, which were published only in the 1990s. Whitman occasionally referred to Stafford as "My (adopted) son" (as in a December 13, 1876, letter to John H. Johnston), but the relationship between the two also had a romantic, erotic charge to it. In 1883, Harry married Eva Westcott. For further discussion of Stafford, see Arnie Kantrowitz, "Stafford, Harry L. (b.1858)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
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