The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to Edmund Clarence Stedman, 22 May 1890
Date: May 22, 1890
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07925
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), 5:49. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Ian Faith, Ryan Furlong, Breanna Himschoot, and Stephanie Blalock
Camden New Jersey1
May 22 1890
Thanks, my dear friend, for y'r good letter2 (enclosing $25) wh' has safely reach'd me—I am pretty well at present—got out yesterday for a three hours drive to the bay shore, & linger'd there in the fine weather & sun for an hour—Have kind attention & all I need—I enclose you some little slips of my stuff already published—Believe me, Stedman, (tho' strange perversions & falsifications sometimes get in newspapers) y'r steady, square & true approbater & friend3—
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Edmund Clarence Stedman
(1833–1908) was a man of diverse talents. He edited for a year the Mountain County Herald at Winsted, Connecticut, wrote
"Honest Abe of the West," presumably Lincoln's first campaign song, and served
as correspondent of the New York World from 1860 to 1862.
In 1862 and 1863 he was a private secretary in the Attorney General's office
until he entered the firm of Samuel Hallett and Company in September, 1863. The
next year he opened his own brokerage office. He published many volumes of poems
and was an indefatigable compiler of anthologies, among which were Poets of America, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1885) and A Library of American Literature from the Earliest
Settlement to the Present Time, 11 vols. (New York: C. L. Webster,
1889–90). For more, see Donald Yannella, "Stedman, Edmund Clarence (1833–1908)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes:
1. This letter is addressed: E. C. Stedman | 137 West 78th Street | New York City. It is postmarked: Camden (?) | May 2(?) | 8 PM | 90. [back]
2. See Stedman's letter to Whitman of May 21, 1890. [back]
3. A reference to the author Carl Sadakichi (C.S.) Hartmann's remarks in the New York Herald on April 14, 1889. See Whitman's April 25, 1889 letter to the Canadian physician Richard Maurice Bucke. [back]