The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to an Unidentified Editor, November (?) 1879
Date: November (?) 1879
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00059
Source: Walt Whitman Collection, The Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Notes for this letter were derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Ted Genoways (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), vol. 7, and supplemented, updated, or created by Whitman Archive staff as appropriate.
Contributors to digital file: Kirsten Clawson, Stefan Schöberlein, Nima Najafi Kianfar, and Nicole Gray
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Let me give you some flying impromptu notes3 confessedly all too meager (a hiatus every where) of my journey starting three months since from the Atlantic Coast and so railroading through New Jersey, Penn, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin over Kansas and the Great Plains into the very height & heart Rocky Mountains with the canons, parks and peaks. Them I reserve for a special letter. Returning to Denver for a few days, then by the southern road to Pueblo, over the Plains, to Kansas City, stopping there a while. *Then through Missouri again to St Louis, where I have been spending a month.
Notes:
1. This is a draft letter. Whitman returned from his Western jaunt to St. Louis in October 1879; if he had indeed spent a month there, then this letter was written in the last days of October or sometime during November. [back]
2. This letter may have been intended for Robert R. Hubach, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Hubach published three interviews with Whitman during October 1879. [back]
3. The "flying impromptu notes" were never published in newspapers or magazines; however, they appear in Specimen Days from sections "Swallows on the River" through "Upon our Land" (204–30). [back]