The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Alfred, Lord Tennyson to Walt Whitman, 15 January 1887
Date: January 15, 1887
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04273
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 created by Whitman Archive staff and/or were derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), and supplemented or updated by Whitman Archive staff.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Kinnaman, Stefan Schöberlein, Ian Faith, and Stephanie Blalock
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Harringford,
Freshwater,
Isle of Wight.
Dear old man,
I the elder old man have received your Article in the Critic, & send you in return my thanks & New-Year's greeting on the wings of this East-wind, which, I trust, is blowing softlier & warmlier on your good gray head than here, where it is rocking the elms & ilexes of my Isle of Wight garden.1
Yours always
Tennyson
Correspondent:
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) succeeded
William Wordsworth as poet laureate of Great Britain in 1850. The intense male
friendship described in In Memoriam, which Tennyson wrote
after the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, possibly influenced Whitman's
poetry. Whitman wrote to Tennyson in 1871 or late 1870, probably shortly after the
visit of Cyril Flower in December, 1870, but the letter is not extant (see Thomas Donaldson,
Walt Whitman the Man [New York: F. P.
Harper, 1896], 223). Tennyson's first letter to Whitman is dated July
12, 1871. Although Tennyson extended an invitation for Whitman
to visit England, Whitman never acted on the offer.
Notes:
1. Of this letter Walt Whitman observed: "Tennyson is an artist even when he writes a letter: this letter is protected all round from indecision, forwardness, uncertainty: it is correct—choice, final" (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Sunday, April 15, 1888.). [back]