The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to William J. Linton, 28 March [1875]
Date: March 28, 1875
Whitman Archive ID: yal.00420
Source: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 2:326. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Elizabeth Lorang, Zachary King, and Eric Conrad
431 Stevens st.
Cor West.
Camden,
N.
Jersey.
Sunday,
March 28.
Dear Linton,1
My note of yesterday, (or day before,) asking for the bill was written in the midst of a splitting headache—& without fully reading yours.
To-day, better, I have just taken up yours to read a second time, (as I generally do with my friends' letters,) & see your kind & friendly gift to me of the prints2—which I accept with thanks & pleasure.
Two days now of fine weather—which I fancy is telling on me, as well as on the frozen ground & sap in the trees—
Love to you—
Walt Whitman
Notes:
1. William James Linton (1812–1897), British-born wood engraver, came to the U. S. in 1867 and settled near New Haven, Conn. He illustrated the works of Whittier, Longfellow, Bryant, and others, wrote the "indispensable" History of Wood-Engraving in America (1882), and edited Poetry of America, 1776–1876 (London, 1878), in which appeared eight of Walt Whitman's poems as well as his picture. Linton's engraving of Walt Whitman appeared in the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass, in Complete Poems & Prose (1888–1889), and in The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman (1902), 10 vols., II, 156; it inspired the poem "Out from Behind This Mask." See Harold Blodgett, "Whitman and the Linton Portrait," Walt Whitman Newsletter, IV (1958), 90–92. According to his Threescore and Ten Years, 1820 to 1890—Recollections (1894), 216–217, Linton met with Walt Whitman in Washington and later visited him in Camden, which Whitman reported in his November 9, 1873, letter to Peter Doyle: "I liked the man much, a fine-natured, good-hearted, big fellow, ... a true poet who could not write poetry, much of wilfulness accounting for his neglect of form." His obituary in the New York Times of January 8, 1898, called Linton "the greatest wood engraver of his time, an artist in other senses, and a poet of no mean ability." [back]
2. Walt Whitman ordered 1,000 impressions of the engraving in his February 24, 1875 letter to Linton. [back]