Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to C. Sadakichi Hartmann, [(?) (?) 1886?]

Date: 1886

Whitman Archive ID: med.00748

Source: The current location of this manuscript is unknown. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 4:61. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

Contributors to digital file: Stefan Schöberlein, Kyle Barton, and Nicole Gray



Yours rec'd—With many thanks1


Walt Whitman


Correspondent:
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann (ca. 1867–1944) was an art historian and early critic of photography as an art form. He visited Whitman in Camden in the 1880s and published his conversations with the poet in 1895. Generally unpopular with other supporters of the poet, he was known during his years in Greenwich Village as the "King of Bohemia." For more information about Hartmann, see John F. Roche, "Hartmann, C. Sadakichi (ca. 1867–1944)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).

Notes:

1. Hartmann includes this transcription at the conclusion of his section recounting his conversations with Whitman in 1886: "I never corresponded with Whitman; the only communication I received from him is a postal card acknowledging receipt of some money for several of his books I had bought" (Conversations with Walt Whitman, 34). According to Edwin Haviland Miller's tabulation, based upon Whitman's letters and his entries in his Commonplace Book, Whitman's income in 1886 amounted to at least $2,289.06: royalties, $120.21; lectures, $742.00; sales of books, $203.35; payments for articles and poems, $360.00; and gifts, $863.50. (The figures on book sales are to some extent conjectural, since Miller assumed that Whitman charged a uniform price.) [back]


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