The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Whitelaw Reid to Walt Whitman, 17 July [1878]
Date: July 17, 1878
Whitman Archive ID: wwh.00025
Source: Walt Whitman House, Camden, N.J. 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.
Related items: Whitman cut this letter into pieces, pasted it together with several other letters, and used it as the foundation for a draft of "You tides with ceaseless swell," written on the back. See wwh.00027.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Kinnaman, Nicole Gray, and Kenneth M. Price
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[illegible] Tribune
New York,
July 17, 1
[illegible]
[illegible] [Whit]man:
I thought we ha [illegible] [cheque?] on last Sa [illegible] inquiry that it [illegible] I hasten to [end?] [illegible]
[illegible] nks for remembering [illegible] to see the poem [illegible] ln, and for sen [illegible] little volume [illegible] ully to day. [illegible] ing the poem [illegible] and still th [illegible] very best thoug [illegible] oid.
[illegible] best wishes
Very truly yours
Whitelaw Reid
[illegible] [Whitm]an, Esq
[Ste]vens St.
[C]amden, N. J.
Correspondent:
Whitelaw Reid (1837–1912) was the editor of
the New York Tribune from 1872 to 1905 and later American
ambassador to France (1889–1892) and England (1905–1912). He met
Whitman in the hospitals during the Civil War. Of his relations with the poet,
Reid later observed: "No one could fail then [during the War] to admire his zeal
and devotion, and I am afraid that at first my regard was for his character
rather than his poetry. It was not till long after 'The Leaves of Grass' period
that his great verses on the death of Lincoln conquered me completely." See
Charles N. Elliot, Walt Whitman as Man, Poet and Friend
(Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1915), 213, and Studies in
Bibliography, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville, VA: Bibliographical
Society of the University of Virginia, 1956), 8:242–249.