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
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 sawsuch 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]