Title: Walt Whitman to Horace Howard Furness, 27 April 1890
Date: April 27, 1890
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07767
Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The transcription presented here is derived from The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 6:50. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Zainab Saleh, Amanda J. Axley, and Stephanie Blalock
with best respects & love1
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Horace Howard Furness
(1833–1912) was the distinguished editor of the Variorum Shakespeare, and
was one of the honorary pallbearers at Whitman's funeral. See also Horace
Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Sunday, January 12, 1889. On April 27,
1890, Whitman sent Furness a copy of "O Captain! My Captain!"
(Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of
Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). See also
Whitman's April 30, 1890, letter to Dr. Silas Weir
Mitchell, a physician specializing in nervous disorders. Furness was somewhat
snide in a letter he wrote to English poet Edmund Gosse on March 29, 1892, three
days after the poet's death: "Let us hope that he is now more favourably
situated than erstwhile for giving a 'yawp over the roofs of the world.' I
should be sorry to think that the yawp would reverberate through our cellars.
I'm not sure that the very best of Walt was not his Jovian looks. Latterly when
I used to see him in his room, with that majestic avalanche of a beard flowing
in snowy luxuriousness over his broad chest, it was not hard to convert his blue
wrapper into blue sky and the vast & innumerable newspapers piled knee deep
around him in[to] the clouds of Olympus. And, oh, the lot of funny stories about
him, gossip pure & simple but nourishing, which 'twould take too long to
write & must be reserved for the pleasant time when you & I can ha'e a
crack thegither."
1. This correspondence card apparently accompanied a transcription of "O Captain! My Captain!," which Whitman sent to Furness on April 27, 1890 (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Furness and his father, Reverend Doctor William Henry Furness (1802–1896), a Unitarian minister in Philadelphia, visited the poet on April 10, 1890. See Whitman's letter to the Canadian physcian Richard Maurice Bucke of April 10, 1890. [back]