Camden New Jersey U S America1
July 20 '87—
A fearfully hot month here but I am getting along with it pretty well—H
Gilchrist2 is still here—he is well—Still
painting my portrait & succeeding—you will see it as it is for London he
is working—A sculptor (Sidney Morse)3 is also
here—has made a good head4 of me & I want you
to have one—I am well pleased with the bookmaking of your edn "Spec:
Days"5—shall soon send you more stuff for "Democratic Vistas"6—I wish you
send me the next "Fortnightly," if Swinburne's7 piece ab't me is
in it8—
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Ernest Percival Rhys
(1859–1946) was a British author and editor; he founded the Everyman's
Library series of inexpensive reprintings of popular works. He included a volume
of Whitman's poems in the Canterbury Poets series and two volumes of Whitman's
prose in the Camelot series for Walter Scott publishers. For more information
about Rhys, see Joel Myerson, "Rhys, Ernest Percival (1859–1946)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes
- 1. This letter is addressed:
Ernest Rhys | Care Walter Scott Publisher | 24 Warwick Lane Paternoster Row |
London England. It is postmarked: Camden, N.J. | Jul 2[illegible] | 4 30 PM | 87. [back]
- 2. Herbert Harlakenden Gilchrist
(1857–1914), son of Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, was an English painter
and editor of Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings
(London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887). For more information, see Marion Walker Alcaro,
"Gilchrist, Herbert Harlakenden (1857–1914)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D.
Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 3. Sidney H. Morse (1832–1903)
was a self-taught sculptor as well as a Unitarian minister and, from 1866 to
1872, editor of The Radical. He visited Whitman in Camden
many times and made various busts of him. Whitman had commented on an earlier
bust by Morse that it was "wretchedly bad." For more on this, see Ruth L. Bohan,
Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art,
1850–1920 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2006), 105–109. [back]
- 4. Morse's bust of the poet
is reproduced in Edwin Haviland Miller, The
Correspondence, Vol. 4 (New York: New York University Press, 1969),
following 278 and in Miller's The Artistic Legacy of Walt
Whitman (New York: New York University Press, 1970), figure 24. The
work of a sculptor with perhaps more enthusiasm than talent, it, like Herbert
Gilchrist's portrait, was nonetheless admired by Whitman. In his letter to John
H. Johnston of September 29, 1887, Whitman wrote
that the second plaster head "is the best thing yet." [back]
- 5. The first issue of Whitman's Specimen Days and Collect was published by the
Philadelphia firm of Rees Welsh and Company in 1882. The second issue was
published by David McKay. Many of the autobiographical notes, sketches, and
essays that focus on the poet's life during and beyond the Civil War had been
previously published in periodicals or in Memoranda During the
War (1875–1876). For more information on Specimen Days, see George Hutchinson and David Drews "Specimen Days [1882]," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D.
Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 6. Rhys helped publish Specimen Days in America in the British publisher Walter
Scott's Camelot Series in 1886, and, in 1887, he would help published Whitman's
Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers (1871) in the
same series. [back]
- 7. The British poet, critic, playwright, and novelist
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) was one of Whitman's
earliest English admirers. At the conclusion of William Blake:
A Critical Essay (1868), Swinburne pointed out similarities between
Whitman and Blake, and praised "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and "When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," which he termed "the most sweet and
sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church of the world" (300–303). His
famous lyric "To Walt Whitman in America" is included in Songs
before Sunrise (1871). For the story of Swinburne's veneration of
Whitman and his later recantation, see two essays by Terry L. Meyers, "Swinburne and Whitman: Further Evidence," Walt
Whitman Quarterly Review 14 (Summer 1996), 1–11 and "A
Note on Swinburne and Whitman," Walt Whitman Quarterly
Review 21 (Summer 2003), 38–39. [back]
- 8. Swinburne's essay
"Whitmania," which tempered his earlier enthusiasm for Whitman and declared that
Whitman was not a major poet, appeared in the Fortnightly
Review, n.s. 42 (August 1, 1887), 170–176. [back]