Title: Walt Whitman to Sheldon & Company, 18 May 1868
Date: May 18, 1868
Whitman Archive ID: prc.00012
Source: Private collection of Mrs. Francis Frederic Phillips. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 2:34. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Kenneth M. Price, Elizabeth Lorang, Zachary King, and Eric Conrad
Washington,
May 18, 1868.
Messrs. Sheldon & Co.1
Dear Sirs:
Your note of 16th May, with draft for Seventy-Five Dollars, in pay for article Personalism, have safely come to hand.
Please accept thanks, &c. &c.
Walt Whitman.
1. The April issue of the Galaxy announced that Sheldon and Co. had assumed financial control of the journal. The reply to this letter is in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The Galaxy in 1868 was more than kind to Whitman and his friends. In March appeared O'Connor's satirical poem "The Ballad of Sir Ball," 328–333, about the authorship of Florence Percy's (Elisabeth Chase Allen) "Rock Me to Sleep." Of the poem Louisa Van Velsor Whitman wrote on March 24, 1868: "it is signed W. i hope nobody will think you wrote it walt." In April the magazine printed John Burroughs' "Before Genius," 421–426, in which he observed: "If we except 'Leaves of Grass' and Emerson's works, there is little as yet in American literature that shows much advance beyond the merely conventional and scholastic." [back]