Your letter of 22 Novr.2 reached me the other day thro' Mr. Conway3. You no doubt will by this time have received the one I addressed to you 2 or 3 weeks ago; but perhaps it may occur to me to repeat here some things said in that letter. I think the most convenient course may be for me first to state the facts about my Selection.
Some while back—I suppose loc.01877.002_large.jpg before the middle of Septr.—Mr. Hotten4
the publisher told me that he projected bringing out a selection from your poems,
& (in consequence of my review5 in the Chronicle) he
asked whether I wd. undertake to make the selection, & write any such prefatory
matter6 as I mt. think desirable. Proud to associate myself
in any way with your writings, or to subserve their diffusion & appreciation
here, I gladly consented.
I at once re-read thro' your last complete edition, & made the selection. In
doing this I was guided by two rules—1, to omit entirely every poem wh. contains loc.01877.003_large.jpg passages or words wh. modern
squeamishness can raise an objection to—& 2, to include, from among the
remaining poems, those wh. I most entirely & intensely admire. The bulk of poems
thus selected is rather less than half the bulk of your complete edition; &,
before my selection went to the printer's hands, I had the advantage of revising it
by the corrected copy you sent some while ago to Mr. Conway. I also added the prose
Preface to Leaves of Grass—obtaining thro' Mr. Conway your permission to alter
(or rather, as I have done, simply to omit) 2 or 3 phrases
in that Preface (only). Thus my selection is a verbatim
loc.01877.004_large.jpg reproduction
of a good number of your poems, unaccompanied by the remainder. There is no
curtailment or alteration whatever—& no modification at all except in
these 3 particulars—
1. I have given a note here & there:
2. I have thought it better, considering the difference of a selection from the sum-total, to re-distribute the poems into 5 classes, which I have termed—Chants Democratic—Drum Taps7—Walt Whitman—Leaves of Grass—Songs of Parting:8
3. I have given titles to many poems wh. in your editions are merely headed with the words of the opening line.
The selection being thus made, I wrote a Prefatory Notice & Dedicatory Letter; & then consigned the whole affair to the publisher & printer, somewhere in the earlier days of October. My prefatory matter, & something like a third (I suppose) of the poems, were in print before your letter of 1 Novr.,9 addressed to Mr. Conway, reached me; & now the Preface to Leaves of Grass is also in print, & I fancy the whole thing ought to be completed & out by Xmas, or very soon after.
The letter wh. I wrote you10 on receipt of yours of 1 Novr.
said that I was about to consult the loc.01877.006_large.jpg publisher as to dropping the mere
selection, & substituting a complete edition, only with slight verbal
modifications. This however the publisher proved unwilling to do, the selection
being so far advanced, advertised, &c. Therefore the selection will come out
exactly as first put together; & on reflection this pleased me decidedly
better.
I now proceed to reply to the details of your letter of 22 Novr.
If any blockhead chooses to call my selection "an expurgated edition," that lie shall
be on his own head, not mine. My Prefatory Notice explains my principle of selection
to exactly the same effect as given in this present letter; &
loc.01877.007_large.jpg
contains moreover a longish passage affirming that, if such freedom of speech as you
adopt were denied to others, all the great literature of the whole world wd. be
castrated or condemned.
The form of title–page wh. you propose wd. of course be adopted by me with thanks
& without a moment's debate, were it not that my own title–page was previously
in print: I enclose a copy.11 I trust you may see nothing in it
to disapprove—as indeed in essentials it comes to much the same as your own
model. However, I have already written to the publisher, suggesting that he shd.
decide, according to the conveniences loc.01877.008_large.jpg of the printing arrangements,
which of the two shall eventually appear.
In making my selection, I preserved all (I believe all)
"the larger figures dividing the pieces into separate passages or sections," but did
not preserve the numbers of the stanzas,—the separation of stanzas, however, continuing as in your edition. I am sorry
now that I did not meet your preference in this respect, & that the printing has
already proceeded too far for me to revert to the small numbers now. My wish was to
get rid of anything of a merely external kind wh. ordinary readers wd. call peculiar
or eccentric. Parrot–like repetitions loc.01877.009_large.jpg of that charge have been too
numerous already.
I need scarcely assure you that that most glorious poem on Lincoln is included in my Selection. It shall appear with your title "President Lincoln's Funeral Hymn."12 I had previously given it a title of my own, "Nocturn for the Death of Lincoln"; & in my Prefatory Notice it is alluded to under that title. A note of explanation shall be given.
I await with impatience the receipt of your paper on Democracy.13 It will find in me no reluctant hearer, as I have
always been a democratic republican, & hope to live & die faithful to the
loc.01877.010_large.jpg meanings of
that glorious creed. The other printed matter you have so kindly sent me14 I received two evenings back from Mr. Conway. The newspaper
articles are new to me: with the publications of Mr. O'Connor15
& Mr. Burroughs16 I was already familiar, & I entertain a
real respect for those publications & their writers.
Believe me, I am grateful to you for your kindness in these matters, & for the
indulgent eye with which you look upon a project which perhaps, after all, you wd.
rather had never been entered upon. I am in some hopes that your indulgence will not
loc.01877.011_large.jpg be
diminished when you see what the selection itself actually looks like. In
consequence of the correspondence wh. has passed since the selection was made, I may
possibly find occasion to add a brief P.S.: it shall contain nothing you cd. object
to. If the selection aids the general body of English poetical readers to understand
that there really is a great poet across the Atlantic, & to demand a complete
& unmutilated edition, my desires connected with the selection will be
accomplished.
Correspondent:
William Michael Rossetti (1829–1915), brother
of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, was an English editor and a champion of
Whitman's work. In 1868, Rossetti edited Whitman's Poems,
selected from the 1867 Leaves of Grass. Whitman referred
to Rossetti's edition as a "horrible dismemberment of my book" in his August 12, 1871, letter to Frederick S. Ellis. Nonetheless,
the edition provided a major boost to Whitman's reputation, and Rossetti would
remain a staunch supporter for the rest of Whitman's life, drawing in
subscribers to the 1876 Leaves of Grass and fundraising
for Whitman in England. For more on Whitman's relationship with Rossetti, see
Sherwood Smith, "Rossetti, William Michael (1829–1915)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).