The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to Harry Stafford, 24 February [1881]
Date: February 24, 1881
Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00429
Source: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 3:214. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Stefan Schoeberlein, Nima Najafi Kianfar, Eder Jaramillo, and Nicole Gray
Camden
Feb: 24 Afternoon1
Dear Hank—
I feel to write you a card, but I guess it will be a dry one, for I have nothing to write about, & I havn't got very smart yet—I go out though—(Seems to me if I couldn't go out in the sun & open air I should give up entirely)—How did you make out with the piece for the Lyceum? I suppose you rec'd what I sent you—the extracts on poetry—did you make a piece and read it as I told you?2 (I'll bet five dollars you didn't do any thing of the kind)—
I rec'd a pamphlet from Edward Carpenter to-day—his forthcoming lectures for 1881—perhaps he sent you one—I have been in all day, occupying myself reading & writing a little—Shall go out now for a couple of hours—There I told you this would be a dry letter—
Walt
Notes:
1. This letter is endorsed (by Richard Maurice Bucke): "1881." The year is established by the reference in the second paragraph and by a notation in Whitman's Commonplace Book (Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). [back]
2. See the letter from Whitman to Harry Stafford of February 17, 1881. [back]