Walt Whitman
The Correspondence, Volume VII
Publication Year: 2004
Now, more than forty years after the inaugural volume’s original publication, Ted Genoways brings scholars the latest volume in Walt Whitman: The Correspondence. Incorporating all of the letters Miller had collected before his death in 2001 and combining them with more than a hundred previously unknown letters he himself gathered, Genoways’s volume is a perfect accompaniment to Miller’s original work.
Among the more than one hundred fifty letters collected in this volume are numerous correspondences concerning Whitman’s Civil War years, including a letter sending John Hay, the personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln, a manuscript copy of “O Captain, My Captain!” Additional letters address various aspects of the production of Leaves of Grass, the most notable being an extensive correspondence surrounding the Deathbed Edition, gathered by Whitman’s friend Horace Traubel, and reproduced here for the first time. Most significantly, this volume at last incorporates Whitman’s early letters to Abraham Paul Leech, first published by Arthur Golden in American Literature in 1986. The revelations contained in these letters must be considered among the most important discoveries about Whitman’s life made during the last half of the twentieth century.
Regardless of whether their significance is great or small, immediate or long-term, each new piece of Whitman’s correspondence returns us to a particular moment in his life and suggests the limitless directions that remain for Whitman scholarship.
Published by: University of Iowa Press
Contents
Foreword
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pp. vii-viii
This volume of Whitman’s correspondence supplements the six volumes of The Correspondence, edited by Edwin Haviland Miller, in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. As is the case with a number of “monumental” editions of the works of major authors, the Whitman Collected Writings project is now hopelessly scattered, fragmented, and incomplete. It is difficult even to keep track of the number of volumes that have appeared. New York University Press began issuing the volumes in...
Introduction
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pp. ix-xvi
Less than four years after the death of America’s first great poet, Thomas Donaldson asserted that “Whitman with the pen was one man – Whitman in private life was another man.” For Donaldson, the division lay in the perfection of Whitman’s utterances. In Leaves of Grass, the poet was in full command, but in private conversation Whitman’s manner of speech was a kind of “mental groping,” in which “impressions were quickly made in his mind, but
A List of Whitman's Correspondents
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pp. xvii-xix
Abbreviations
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pp. xxi-xxii
The Correspondence
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pp. 1-121
Calendar of Letters to Whitman (Revised 2003)
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pp. 123-187
This calendar includes extant letters written to WW. The following information appears in the entries: (1) the date; (2) the name of the correspondent, sometimes with a brief identification in order to indicate the nature of the correspondence; (3) the location of the letter, if known; and (4) appearances in print, if any. All letters in the calendar unless...
Index to Volume VII
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pp. 189-192
E-ISBN-13: 9781587294785
E-ISBN-10: 1587294788
Print-ISBN-13: 9780877458913
Print-ISBN-10: 087745891X
Page Count: 217
Publication Year: 2004
Series Title: Iowa Whitman Series
