Title: Walt Whitman to John Addington Symonds, 20 June 1886
Date: June 20, 1886
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04965
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: Stefan Schöberlein and Kyle Barton
image 1 | image 2 |
from 328 Mickle street
Camden New Jersey U S America1
June 20 1886
My dear Sir
I write a line to introduce & authenticate a valued personal & literary friend of mine, Wm Sloane Kennedy, who will send you this. He is every way friendly & rapport with "Leaves of Grass" & with me.
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
John Addington Symonds
(1840–1893), a prominent biographer, literary critic, and poet in
Victorian England, was author of the seven-volume history Renaissance in Italy, as well as Walt
Whitman—A Study (1893), and a translator of Michelangelo's
sonnets. But in the smaller circles of the emerging upper-class English
homosexual community, he was also well known as a writer of homoerotic poetry
and a pioneer in the study of homosexuality, or sexual inversion as it was then
known. See Andrew C. Higgins, "Symonds, John Addington [1840–1893]," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
1. This letter is addressed: John Addington Symonds | Am Hof Davos | Platz Graubünden | Switzerland. [back]