The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Laura Daintrey to Walt Whitman, 8 October 1889
Date: October 8, 1889
Whitman Archive ID: med.00882
Source: The location of this manuscript is unknown. The transcription presented here is derived from With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906–1998), ed. Horace Traubel (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 6:75. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Blake Bronson-Bartlett, Caterina Bernardini, Breanna Himschoot, and Stephanie Blalock
THE CHELSEA
222 WEST 23 STREET
NEW YORK
Dear Mr. Whitman.
In case you have not seen it, I send you Sir Edwin Arnold's1 letter describing his recent visit to you. With it accept the tribute of one who supremely admires your poems' national spirit, and who regards your 'Bravest of All'2 as the grandest of war-lyrics.
Very truly yours
Laura Daintrey
England
October 8/89
Correspondent:
Laura Daintrey was an
American novelist who wrote Miss Varian of New York
(1887), Eros (1888), Fedor (1889),
and Actæon (1892), among other novels. She was often
associated with women writers of erotic and sensational works, including Laura
Jean Libbey and Gertrude Atherton.
Notes:
1. Sir Edwin Arnold (1832–1904) was an English poet and journalist. He visited Whitman in 1889 and in 1891. He documented his visit to Whitman in an article entitled "Sir Edwin Arnold and Whitman" that was published anonymously in The Springfield Republican on November 7, 1891. [back]
2. It is unclear what poem Daintrey has in mind; perhaps she has confused Whitman with John Greenleaf Whittier, whose immensely popular "Barbara Frietchie" described the old woman from Frederick, Maryland, who waved the Stars and Stripes while General Lee's and Stonewall Jackson's rebel troops marched by her window, as "Bravest of all in Frederick town." [back]