The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to Joseph M. Stoddart, 4 February 1891
Date: February 4, 1891
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07994
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 Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 5:161. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Cristin Noonan, Stephanie Blalock, and Andrew David King
Camden N J—
Feb: 4 '91
Sh'd like to have (for our own uses to send about this country & to Europe) 100 printed impressions (the whole stuff) of the poems & my own & H Traubel's1 piece—so that we c'd have them stitched if we like.2 Of course we will pay the printers. Horace T. will hand you this & will arrange & boss the thing, if you folks are agreeable (as I suppose there is no reason but what you sh'd be.)
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
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).
Notes:
1. 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). [back]
2. In March 1891, Lippincott's published "Old Age Echoes," a cycle of four poems including "Sounds of the Winter," "The Unexpress'd," "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht," and "After the Argument," accompanied by an extensive autobiographical note called "Some Personal and Old-Age Memoranda." Also appearing in that issue was a piece on Whitman by Horace Traubel. [back]