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The Critic
743 BROADWAY
NEW YORK
19 October, 1888.
Dear W. Whitman:
As one of the "Forty Immortals" elected by "THE CRITIC'S
readers in the spring of 1884, we should value your answer to the question raised by
Mr. Edmund Gosse1 in his paper in the October Forum, entitled
"Has America Produced a Poet?"—the question, namely, whether any American
poet, not now living, deserves a place among the thirteen "English inheritors of
unassailed renown" (Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley
and Keats).
Do you deem any American poet worthy of this honor?
If so, which one?
Very sincerely yours,
J. L. & J. B. Gilder
Your name will not be mentioned separately if you object2
letter in response sent Oct 20
WW
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Correspondent:
Jeannette Leonard Gilder
(1849–1916) and her brother Joseph Benson Gilder (1858–1936) edited
The Critic together from 1881 to 1906. For more
information on Jeannette Gilder, see Susan L. Roberson, "Gilder, Jeannette L. (1849–1916)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes
- 1. Sir Edmund William Gosse (1849–1928), English
poet and author of Father and Son (a memoir published in
1907), had written to Whitman on December 12,
1873: "I can but thank you for all that I have learned from you, all the
beauty you have taught me to see in the common life of healthy men and women,
and all the pleasure there is in the mere humanity of other people" (see Horace
Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Friday, June 1, 1888). Gosse reviewed Two
Rivulets in "Walt Whitman's New Book," The Academy, 9 (24
June 1876), 602–603, and visited Whitman in 1885 (see Whitman's letter
inviting Gosse to visit on December 31, 1884, Gosse's December 29, 1884 letter to Whitman, and
The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller [New
York: New York University Press, 1961–1977], 3:384 n80). In a letter to
Richard Maurice Bucke on October 31, 1889, Whitman
characterized Gosse as "one of the amiable conventional wall-flowers of
literature." For more about Gosse, see Jerry F.
King, "Gosse, Sir Edmund (1849–1928)," Walt Whitman:
An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 2. Whitman's response was
published in the November 24, 1888, Critic, along with
responses by many other writers (including John Greenleaf Whittier, John
Burroughs, Francis Parkman, and Julia Ward Howe). Whitman wrote that "the names
of Bryant, Emerson, Whittier and Longfellow (with even added names, sometimes
Southerners, sometimes Western or other writers of only one or two pieces,)
deserve in my opinion an equally high niche of renown as belongs to any on the
baker's dozen of that glorious list." [back]