Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to Anne Gilchrist, 22 July 1882

Date: July 22, 1882

Whitman Archive ID: upa.00208

Source: Walt Whitman Collection, 1842–1957, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 3:298–299. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

Contributors to digital file: Stefan Schoeberlein, Nima Najafi Kianfar, Eder Jaramillo, and Nicole Gray




Camden N J
U S A1
July 22—'82

We are all still here & about the same—I am well as usual—your letters rec'd & dearly welcomed2—I am busy printing "Specimen Days"—the Staffords well—best love—


W W

first Phil. ed'n out last Wednesday—all sold in twenty four hours—not one left—2d ed'n ready soon—


Notes:

1. This letter is addressed: Mrs Anne Gilchrist | Keats' Corner—12 Well Road | Hampstead | London England. It is postmarked: Phila. Paid All | Jul | 22 | 1882 | Pa. [back]

2. Anne Gilchrist wrote on May 8 and again on June 18. In the earlier letter she objected to Whitman's rearrangement of his poems and to the new titles in the 1882 edition. In the latter she praised "A Memorandum at a Venture": "It is as clear as daylight to me that you speak truth—invigorating ennobling truth, full of hope & promise & impetus for the race. I have never for a moment wavered in my belief in this truth since it burst upon me a veritable sunrise in reading your poems in 1869" (University of Pennsylvania). On July 28 Gilchrist in a letter to Burroughs offered her defense of Whitman, which she was willing to have submitted to the New York Tribune (Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs—Comrades [Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931], 220–221). The newspaper, however, declined to publish it (Barrus, 242). [back]


Comments?

Published Works | In Whitman's Hand | Life & Letters | Commentary | Resources | Pictures & Sound

Support the Archive | About the Archive

Distributed under a Creative Commons License. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price, editors.