Walt Whitman to ‘My friends’
At the Complimentary Dinner, Camden, New Jersey, May 31, 1889.
Camden: May 31, 1889.
Price: $5,500.00
About the item
Published in Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman (Philadelphia: McKay, 1889), with the text as corrected by Whitman. Small broadside printed recto only, corrected in manuscript in Whitman's hand, with 13 words added and two crossed out. 4 1/2 x 6 inches. Walt Whitman to ‘My friends’. Old crease. BAL 21521; Meyerson F7.
Item #322514
Walt Whitman graciously declines to address the gathering in his honor at the Complimentary Dinner, Camden, New Jersey, May 31, 1889, marking this proof with an added sentence, “My friends though announced to give an address, there is no such intention.” He has struck through the now redundant aside (“my friends”) in the first sentence.
The wording of Whitman’s written remarks for his seventieth birthday as published by Traubel in Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman (1889) incorporates these corrections; the piece was retitled “To Be Present Only” for the Complete Prose (1892).
OCLC records one location for this broadside, at Yale, marked in Whitman’s hand “25 copies good paper”.
