Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to John Burroughs, 13 February [1877]

Date: February 13, 1877

Whitman Archive ID: uva.00382

Source: Papers of Walt Whitman (MSS 3829), Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. 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 created by Whitman Archive staff and/or were derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), and supplemented or updated by Whitman Archive staff.

Contributors to digital file: Alicia Bones, Anthony Dreesen, Eder Jaramillo, Kevin McMullen, Nicole Gray, and Kenneth Price



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431 Stevens st Camden
Feb 13—p m

Dear John Burroughs

Yours of 6th only rec'd this afternoon by me—as I have just return'd to day from a week down at a farm in Jersey—

—I hope you will adopt Birds & Poets—& then the Flight of the Eagle1—As the more I think of them, the better I like both—(I mean directly & indirectly, & for wear)—Come on to Mrs. Gilchrist's 16th or 17th2—I will prepare them—I will be there—it is 1929 north 22d street—I still keep pretty well for me


WW


Notes:

1. "The Flight of the Eagle" is the chapter devoted to Walt Whitman in Birds and Poets. See Whitman's letter to John Burroughs, 24 January 1877[back]

2. Burroughs arrived in Philadelphia on February 15; see Whitman's letter to Anne Gilchrist, 14 February 1877. In his journal on February 17, Burroughs recorded his visit with Walt Whitman: "It is a feast to look at Walt's face; it is incomparably the grandest face I ever saw—such sweetness and harmony, and such strength . . . If that is not the face of a poet, then it is the face of a god. None of his pictures do it half justice" (Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs—Comrades (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 160). [back]


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