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Letters   COLLECTIONS OF LETTERS BY AND TO WHITMAN Whitman's letters, of course, are collected in an excellent edition by Edwin Haviland Miller as part of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. Miller has also edited Selected Letters of Walt Whitman (1990), which we're using in this seminar, a judicious culling of the most important letters, including the recently discovered early letters Whitman wrote when he was a schoolteacher in 1840 (which do not appear in the Collected Writings volumes). Miller's original six Correspondence volumes include nearly 2900 letters. If we include the letters that have turned up since Miller's final volume, there are well over 3000 extant Whitman letters. Miller's volume 5 includes an addenda containing letters that showed up after his first four volumes were published; his volume 6 is a supplement of ninety additional letters that were discovered in the eight years after volume 5. Volume 6 also contains a composite index to all six volumes of the Correspondence--a very valuable tool, since the Addenda and Supplement add letters that are out of chronological sequence. Since volume 6 appeared, lots more Whitman letters have appeared; many have been printed in the Walt Whitman Review and the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. In 1991, I published a special issue of WWQR (edited by Miller) that collected all the Whitman letters that appeared since Miller's volume 6; this was officially "A Second Supplement with a Revised Calendar of Letters Written to Whitman." The "Calendar," one of the most important features of Miller's edition of the Correspondence, consists of the list (at the back of each volume) of letters written to Whitman. These lists give a chronology of letters Whitman received, and they tell you where the letter can be found. If any particular letter has been published, that information is included as well, but most of the letters, of course, never have been published. This is an odd characteristic of scholarly editions of letters--the correspondence is always treated as if it were one-way. The Whitman Archive plans someday to do a complete correspondence section, with all letters by and to Whitman. Miller's notes are good at filling you in on what various letters to Whitman were about, but those notes are no substitute for the actual letters. The "Updated Calendar" in the WWQR issue supersedes the "Calendars" in the earlier volumes. In 2000, I published a special double-issue of WWQR (vol. 18, Summer/Fall 2000) called "Discoveries": it contains a "Third Supplement" of letters discovered since Miller's "Second Supplement" (nearly 70 more letters), as well as "Addenda to the Calendar of Letters Written to Whitman." This supplement was edited by Ted Genoways, a former member of this seminar, who then edited a "Fourth Supplement" published in WWQR in 2002 (vol. 19, Winter/Spring 2002), with 33 more letters. More letters keep appearing, and Ted has edited a volume that serves as Volume 7 of The Correspondence, published by University of Iowa Press (it is now on reserve). Eventually, the correspondence will find its way onto the Whitman Archive, where it belongs, and where it can finally be available electronically so that it can be accessed chronologically, by correspondent, by subject, and so on. Fortunately we have several volumes of letters from Whitman's friends and relatives that help fill in the missing half of the record of correspondence (that is, the letters written to Whitman instead of by him). The first such collection was The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman, edited by Thomas Harned (1918); this edition includes Anne's ardent essay, "A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman," and all her known letters to Whitman, Whitman's to her, and some from her children to Walt. Artem Lozynsky edited The Letters of Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke to Walt Whitman (1977), nearly 300 pages of letters--mostly written in the late 1880s--to Whitman from his Canadian psychiatrist disciple. The letters of Whitman's Irish admirer (and co-translator of Leaves into German) Thomas William Rolleston are collected in Whitman and Rolleston: A Correspondence (1951). There are published collections of letters from two of Whitman's brothers. Jerome Loving edited the Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman (1975), mostly letters written on the battlefield to Walt and to Louisa (George and Walt's mother); this edition also includes George's Civil War diary. Dennis Berthold and Kenneth Price edited Dear Brother Walt: The Letters of Thomas Jefferson Whitman (1984); these letters from Whitman's younger brother (who accompanied Walt to New Orleans) include his notes to his parents from New Orleans and letters to Whitman from 1860 to 1889. Thomas Jefferson Whitman's wife, Martha Mitchell Whitman, wrote some letters to Whitman and to his mother that are very illuminating about the complex relationships within the Whitman family; they are collected by Randall Waldron in Mattie: The Letters of Martha Mitchell Whitman (1977). Whitman's mother's letters are amazing, but they have not been published in a complete edition; selections can be found in Faint Clews and Indirections (1949), edited by Clarence Gohdes and Rollo Silver, which prints manuscripts from Duke University's Whitman collection. (And take a look at Michael Moon's and Eve Sedgwick's "Confusion of Tongues" in Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies for a creative use of Whitman's mother's letters.) Many of the most fascinating letters to Whitman, of course, are collected in the published letters of the authors who knew him--John Addington Symonds, for example, and William Michael Rossetti (Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti [1990], edited by Roger W. Peattie, contains almost twenty letters to Whitman). There are many letters to Whitman from various people gathered in the nine big volumes of Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden. A fascinating book of letters to Whitman is Charley Shively's Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working-Class Camerados (1987), which contains letters from many of Whitman's young male friends, including Peter Doyle and Harry Stafford as well as some of the soldiers that Whitman met during the Civil War. Shively reads the letters as evidence of Whitman's homosexuality; his arguments are often forced, and his editing is sometimes suspect, but the letters are fascinating documents nonetheless. Shively also issued a second volume of letters to Whitman, this one called Drum Beats: Walt Whitman's Civil War Boy Lovers (1989); again, Shively offers an analysis of the letters portraying Whitman as a promiscuous, omnivorous gay lover; there are some suspect readings here, but the letters from Civil War soldiers to Whitman are often mysterious and wonderful documents. Again, eventually this chaos of letters will be gathered and organized electronically on the Whitman Archive, but it's still a long ways away. [Home]