The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to William Michael Rossetti (?), [May (?) 1875]
Date: May 1875
Whitman Archive ID: prc.00100
Source: Miller's transcription is derived from an excerpt that appeared in The Academy 7 (29 May 1875), 554. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 2:330. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Jonathan Y. Cheng, Elizabeth Lorang, Nima Najafi Kianfar, Alex Kinnaman, and Nicole Gray
Yes, I shall, unless prevented, bring out a volume this summer, partly as my contribution to our National Centennial. It is to be called Two Rivulets1 (i.e., two flowing chains of prose and verse, emanating the real and ideal), it will embody much that I had previously written. . . . but about one-third, as I guess, that is fresh. Leaves of Grass, proper, will remain as it is identically. The new volume will have nearly or quite as much matter as L. of G. (It is a sort of omnibus in which I have packed all the belated ones since the outset of the Leaves.)
Correspondent:
William Michael Rossetti (1829–1915), brother
of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, was an English editor and a champion of
Whitman's work. In 1868, Rossetti edited Whitman's Poems,
selected from the 1867 Leaves of Grass. Whitman referred
to Rossetti's edition as a "horrible dismemberment of my book" in his August 12, 1871, letter to Frederick S. Ellis. Nonetheless,
the edition provided a major boost to Whitman's reputation, and Rossetti would
remain a staunch supporter for the rest of Whitman's life, drawing in
subscribers to the 1876 Leaves of Grass and fundraising
for Whitman in England. For more on Whitman's relationship with Rossetti, see
Sherwood Smith, "Rossetti, William Michael (1829–1915)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes:
1. This excerpt appeared on May 29 in The Academy, to which Rossetti contributed; see Whitman's letter to Rossetti of April (?) 1875. The article began: "Walt Whitman writes to a correspondent...." However, see the identical description of Two Rivulets in a letter to Edward Dowden of May 2, 1875. Whitman probably used similar phraseology in two letters, one written on May 2 to Dowden and another written about the same time to Rossetti. [back]