| I have chosen 250 from the almost 2800 letters in the six-volume edition of The Correspondence of Walt Whitman, which I edited for the New York University Press edition of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. |
| The earliest letter was written when Whitman was twenty-one, a schoolteacher fumbling to establish his identity and to find a sense of direction. The last was penned nine days before his death on March 26, 1892, when he was approaching his seventy-third birthday. The final letter, actually a note, consisted of thirteen words. He was barely able to shape the letters of his final "God bless you" to his favorite sister, Hannah. |
| Whitman had strong convictions that letters were intended to connect people in affectionate bonds, not to provide a vehicle for discussions of literary and intellectual matters. He did not subscribe to the belief that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. He sought fame eagerly, even calculatedly in his self-puffs, but he craved loving relationships more. |
| The letters constitute an autobiography, but an admittedly limited one, for he also unfolded other self-portraits in his poetry and in his prose writings. From the letters he excluded with notable consistency the struggles, doubts, and ecstasies of the creativity which, almost miraculously in the absence of a preparatory foreground, at age thirty-six, transformed him from a journalist and author of no unusual promise into a revolutionary poet whose "barbaric yawp" sounded "over the roofs of the world," in a new poetry, almost a new language, which outraged many readers because of its frankness, confused others, and inspired, even ravished, a limited audience which longed for a new voice in that century in search of a hero. |
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Iowa City