The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to Horace Traubel, [7 February 1891?]
Date: [February 7, 1891?]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07883
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.
Related item: Whitman wrote this letter to Traubel in the lower margin of a letter from Joseph Marshall Stoddart to the poet. Whitman seems to have intended to give Stoddart's letter to Traubel as an enclosure. See loc.04681.
Contributors to digital file: Blake Bronson-Bartlett, Ian Faith, Alex Ashland, and Stephanie Blalock
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Horace T:
you call on Mr: S1 & act & settle it in my place. I hereby empower you fully
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Horace L. Traubel (1858–1919)
was an American essayist, poet, and magazine publisher. He is best remembered as
the literary executor, biographer, and self-fashioned "spirit child" of Walt
Whitman. During the mid-1880s and until Whitman's death in 1892, Traubel visited
the poet virtually every day and took thorough notes of their conversations,
which he later transcribed and published in three large volumes entitled With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906, 1908, & 1914).
After his death, Traubel left behind enough manuscripts for six more volumes of
the series, the final two of which were published in 1996. For more on Traubel,
see Ed Folsom, "Traubel, Horace L. [1858–1919]," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes:
1. Joseph Marshall Stoddart (1845–1921) published Stoddart's Encyclopaedia America, established Stoddart's Review in 1880, which was merged with The American in 1882, and became the editor of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1886. On January 11, 1882, Whitman received an invitation from Stoddart through J. E. Wainer, one of his associates, to dine with Oscar Wilde on January 14 (Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs—Comrades [Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931], 235n). [back]