Title: Walt Whitman to Isaac Hull Platt (?), 22 October [1880?]
Date: October 22, 1880
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00355
Source: T. E. Hanley 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), 3:190. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Alicia Bones, Grace Thomas, Eder Jaramillo, Kevin McMullen, and Nicole Gray
431 Stevens Street
Camden New Jersey
Oct 22 p m1
Dear Sir
Thanks for your kind letter, just rec'd & read with greatest interest & pleasure—I sell my books, Centennial or author's edition, myself—Circular enclosed—will I think give you the information you ask—
Walt Whitman
1. Isaac Hull Platt (1853–1917) was a New York attorney, a Baconian, and an early biographer of Whitman (1904). In his Commonplace Book Whitman noted sending a circular to Platt on October 22, but on the following page, on Platt's calling card, he wrote: "Oct 23—Letter from, very warm ab't poems, & asking ab't books—I sent circular . . . (I sent the letter to Dr Bucke)." The poet sent the 1876 Leaves of Grass on October 27 (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). [back]