I thank you very much for your letter1 received this
morning. Its frank and pleasant tone makes me regret even more than I should
otherwise have done, to feel myself obliged to say at once that I do not see my way
to bringing out a complete edition of your poems in England. I admire them loc.01613.002_large.jpg so very much
myself that I should much like to do it but there are certain pieces (among those
which I admire the most) which would not go down in England, and it certainly would
not be worth while to publish it again in a mutilated form, nor of course would you
wish it. W. M. Rossetti2 is a great admirer of your poems and a
man by no means squeamish yet you see he did not venture to publish them without
alteration in England. I think he was wrong: they should have been published
complete & with your sanction or let alone. May I keep the volume you send me?
if so I will remit you the price for I have tried in vain to get a complete edition
through Trübners.3
Correspondent:
Frederick Startridge Ellis
(1830–1901) was a London bookseller, publisher, and author who published
the works of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Whitman first wrote to
Ellis on August 12, 1871, to ask if he would
publish Leaves of Grass. Ellis declined, writing in an
August 23 letter that there were poems in Leaves of Grass that "would not go down in England," but
he praised Whitman's poetry and sent him a specially printed copy of Algernon
Charles Swinburne's Songs before Sunrise.