I was very much delighted some weeks ago to receive a copy of the New Republic with a little memorandum in your handwriting. Time does not diminish my reverential admiration for your work, nor do the unintelligent remarks of the English press deter me from giving expression to the same in print. I hope soon to have an opportunity of explaining at large, in a new series of critical studies of the Greek Poets, what I meant in the little note alluded to by the reviewer of the Quarterly, & to show how it is only by adopting an attitude of mind similar to yours that we can in this age be in true unity with whatever great & natural & human loc_vm.00298_large.jpg has been handed to us from the past.—
I was the more pleased to have this communication from you, because I feared that the last time I wrote to you I might perhaps have spoken something amiss. I then—it was about three years ago, I think,—sent you a poem called "Callicrates"2 & asked you questions about "Calamus."3 Pray believe me that I only refer to this circumstance now in order to explain the reason why since that time I have kept silence from a fear I might have been importunate or ill-advised in what I wrote. There was really no reason why you should have noticed that communication; & it gives me great loc_vm.00299_large.jpg satisfaction to feel that your friendly remembrance of me is not diminished.—
Now, though late, I may express the deep sorrow with which I heard of your illness.4 How Whitman must have borne such a trial, no one knows better than one who like myself has learned to have absolute faith in his manliness and vigour of Soul. Yet it is not the less sad to think that he who could enjoy life so fully, has met with this impediment.—
I look forward with a keen foretaste of delight to your new volume announced.5
Believe me ever gratefully and indebtedly yours John Addington Symonds.—T.O. loc_vm.00300_large.jpg My permanent address is: Clifton Hill House Clifton, Bristol.I should have written earlier had I not been moving rapidly from place to place during an Italian journey.
loc_vm.00295_large.jpg see notes July 24 1888 J A Symonds loc_tb.00676.jpgCorrespondent:
John Addington Symonds
(1840–1893), a prominent biographer, literary critic, and poet in
Victorian England, was author of the seven-volume history Renaissance in Italy, as well as Walt
Whitman—A Study (1893), and a translator of Michelangelo's
sonnets. But in the smaller circles of the emerging upper-class English
homosexual community, he was also well known as a writer of homoerotic poetry
and a pioneer in the study of homosexuality, or sexual inversion as it was then
known. See Andrew C. Higgins, "Symonds, John Addington [1840–1893]," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).