Thanks for your good "Essays" which came safely this forenoon—thanks for your warm & affectionate words ab't me2—I am living here quite disabled & paralyzed, but in good heart & able to read & write—
—Is this the right address?
Walt WhitmanCorrespondent:
Roden Noel (1834–1894) was an
English poet. Noel came from an aristocratic English family, and in his youth
developed socialist sympathies. He was a close friend of the poet and
influential critic Robert Buchanan, and it may have been through Buchanan that
Noel first encountered Leaves of Grass in 1871 (the same
year that he first wrote to Whitman). In 1871, Noel published an essay entitled
"A Study of Walt Whitman" in The Dark Blue (Harold
Blodgett, Walt Whitman in England [Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1934], 147–149).