The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta, 6 June 1871
Date: June 6, 1871
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00235
Source: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 2:121. 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
Department of Justice
Washington
June
6, 1871.
Mrs. Botta:1
My dear Madam:
I sent you by mail about three weeks ago, (in compliance with your request of April 13,) the MS. of one of my poems, "O Star of France"—also a photographic portrait. Please let me know whether they arrived safely.
With greatest respect.
Walt Whitman
Notes:
1. Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta (1815–1891) was a teacher, a poet, and a sculptor. Her "literary" evenings in New York are mentioned in Bayard Taylor's John Godfrey's Fortunes. According to the Memoirs of Anne C. L. Botta (1894), 14, Poe gave his first public reading of "The Raven" at her home. Her evaluation of Walt Whitman's poetry appeared in her often reprinted Handbook of Universal Literature (1885 ed.), 535: "Walt Whitman . . . writes with great force, originality, and sympathy with all forms of struggle and suffering, but with utter contempt for conventionalities and for the acknowledged limits of true art." [back]