Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to William D. O'Connor, 17 September [1883]

Date: September 17, 1883

Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00499

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), 3:352. 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, Kirsten Clawson, Nima Najafi Kianfar, and Nicole Gray




Camden N J1
Sept
17

I wish you would send me (if you have it) the piece in the N Y Evening Post of a while since—the subject of your letter—rejected by the P. & by N Y Times also2—Which piece I will return you—Marvin3 spent Saturday afternoon last with me, & has posted me up about many things. (You have an immense accepter & champion in M.)


W W


Notes:

1. This letter is endorsed: "Answ'd Sept. 18/83." It is addressed: Wm D O'Connor | Life Saving Service | Treasury | Washington D C. It is postmarked: Philadelphia | Pa. | Sep 17 83 | 2 30 PM. [back]

2. O'Connor wrote an answer to the review of Bucke's biography in The Nation of July 26, the first sentence of which read: "This is an unadulterated eulogy by a man of very little culture or critical ability." According to O'Connor's letter on September 18, the New York Times rejected it for "professional reasons." Richard Maurice Bucke, writing to O'Connor on December 16, said of the article in The Nation: "don't see anything in it to get mad about—do you get in a passion every time you hear a hog grunt out of time? If so I fear, old man, you have a bad time" (The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). [back]

3. Marvin's criticism of Leaves of Grass was reprinted in Bucke's book (163–165). [back]


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