Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Corrigan, John Michael

English

Visions of Power and Dispossession: Emerson, Whitman, and the "Robust Soul"

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 29, no. 1

Brodhead Glaser, Brian

Reassessing Whitman's Hegelian Affinities

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Winter 2011

Folsom, Ed

Loving, Jerome

141
NOTES
WHITMAN SURPRISED: THE POET IN 1885  
In the same year that featured Silas Lapham as the owner of a thoroughbred 
trotting horse and sleek cutter, Walt Whitman rode around the New Jersey 
countryside and streets of Camden in a “natty phaeton” drawn by a “smart 
chestnut horse.” It was the surprise gift of a number of prominent individuals 
who answered the call of Tom Donaldson, the poet’s lawyer friend from 
Philadelphia. Donaldson limited every contributor to a donation of ten dollars, 
though Mark Twain, who expressed “great veneration for the old man,” offered 
to make an annual payment for the upkeep of the horse. Twain’s close friend 
William Dean Howells, the author of The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), also 
contributed, but he did not want his generosity towards the now enfeebled 
“Good Gray Poet” made public. Howells, who had never appreciated Whitman 
nearly as much as he had Emerson and the Schoolroom Poets, did not want his 
involvement with the gift to be taken as an endorsement for Leaves of Grass, 
and so volunteered only “on the condition that I do not appear in the list of 
subscribers.”1 
Mark Twain had also hesitated to get involved with the poet whose book 
had been “banned in Boston” back in 1882. He had written a letter to the 
editor of a Boston newspaper arguing that Whitman’s verse was in no way 
“indecent” compared to the classics of antiquity found in every gentleman’s 
library. “Now I think I can show, by a few extracts,” he wrote in the letter-
to-the-editor that he ended up never mailing, “that in matters of coarseness, 
obscenity, and power to excite salacious passions, Walt Whitman’s book is 
refined and colorless and impotent, contrasted with that other and more 
widely read batch of literature.”2 He cited among others Rabelais’ Gargantua 
and Pantagruel.  
John Greenleaf Whittier allowed his name to be included among the list 
of contributors, but he also sided with Howells in hesitating to make his gift 
of ten dollars (the equivalent of more than two-hundred dollars today) any 
kind of endorsement for Leaves of Grass. “I am sorry to hear of the physical 
disabilities of the man who tenderly nursed the wounded Union soldiers and 
as tenderly sung the dirge of their great captain,” he wrote Donaldson on June 
5, 1885. “I have no doubt, in his lameness, that a kind, sober-paced roadster 
would be more serviceable to him than the untamed, rough-jolting Pegasus 
he has been accustomed to ride—without check or snaffle.” The Quaker poet 
concluded his remarks about the other Quaker poet from Brooklyn with the 
following caveat: “I need not say perhaps that I have been pained by some 
portions of W. W.’s writings, which for his own sake, and that of his readers, 
I wish could be omitted” (Donaldson, 175).
142
Howells was not the only one who contributed anonymously; only twenty-
six of the thirty-two donors evidently allowed their names to be published. 
Charles Dudley Warner, Twain’s co-author of The Gilded Age (1874), openly 
contributed. So did Edwin Booth, the famous actor (and older brother of John 
Wilkes Booth), and Richard Watson Gilder, editor of The Century, which had 
recently published three segments of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Otherwise, 
the public list contained the names of disciples or close friends of the poet, 
including Richard Maurice Bucke of Canada and William Douglas O’Connor, 
the author of The Good Gray Poet now ailing in Washington, D.C. Of the $320 
collected, Whitman received in cash “to feed the horse, etc.” $135.00. The 
horse, equipage, and delivery charge came to $184.60, or well over $4000 in 
today’s dollars (Donaldson, 172, 186-187).
 The September 16, 1885, article from the New York Times printed 
below was obviously not written by the poet who had often slipped anonymous 
pieces about himself into the newspapers.3 Usually, such pieces reminded 
readers that he was still alive and that ergo his book still lived as well. “Walt 
Whitman Surprised,” on the other hand, presents the old poet as an object 
of pity, albeit a proud and enduring object nevertheless. While Whitman is 
referred to in the article as “the poet,” there is no mention of Leaves of Grass 
or any allusion to the poet’s notoriety. He was at the time probably better 
remembered (if not famous) for his hospital work during the war, as Whittier 
suggests in his otherwise scolding letter. Upon receiving the letter that came 
with the gift, the poet is described here as slow to move about and thus in great 
need of a vehicle to allow him to get out of the house. The Camden blue laws in 
1885 did not allow public horse cars to run on Sundays “so that,” Donaldson 
wrote in his 1896 memoir about the poet, “Mr. Whitman has been virtually 
a prisoner [in his Mickle Street row house] from Saturdays until Mondays” 
(187). His surprise gift liberated him. 
WALT WHITMAN SURPRISED 
PRESENTED BY MANY FRIENDS WITH A HANDSOME HORSE  
AND PHAETON
PhiladelPhia, Sept. 15.—Toward sundown this evening, as Walt Whitman was half 
dozing over a pile of manuscript near a window in his little frame house in Camden, 
the jarring rattle of wheels startled the old man, and a smart chestnut horse drew a 
natty phaeton up to the door. The poet glanced over his flowers at the turnout and 
nodded kindly to the little chap who held the reins, for he was a favorite, the son of his 
old friend, Tom Donaldson. The boy carefully tied the animal and handed up with a 
mysterious air a portentious [sic] envelope, big and fat, and started to walk away, but 
was called back and induced to enter the cozy workshop.
“What’s all this about, my boy?” inquired Walt Whitman, turning over the missive, 
and handling it very much as if he feared it might contain dynamite.
“Them’s the documents,” piped the little fellow, in a childish treble.
“What documents? A commission from some foreign Court?” returned the old 
gentleman playfully, as he held the envelope up to the light and fruitlessly attempted to 
peer through the cover into the contents. “Is it a patent of nobility, or is it an address 
from a lot of my young friends?”
143
“Why don’t you open it?” suggested the somewhat matter-of-fact emissary, who 
was on pins and needles through the consciousness of the possession of a huge secret 
many sizes too big for so small a custodian.
It seemed a long time that the poet consumed in adjusting his glasses and scanning 
the chirography of the superscription, and whole eras winged their way into eternity 
while he deliberately and nicely cut open the end and extracted the contents. Several 
large sheets of paper were folded up within. On them were scrawled the names of a 
number of prominent men in the various walks of life, but not a line to explain their 
significance save “Walt Whitman, with compliments of —” which was written at the 
top of the first page.
The old poet turned the sheets upside down and looked on the backs of them, while 
his forehead wrinkled with perplexity. He took off his glasses and polished them with 
his silk handkerchief, but their increased translucence did not augment their power of 
unraveling the mystery. In utter astonishment he turned to the boy, whom he began 
to suspect of joking with him, but that young man, who had been writhing under the 
effects of volcanic emotions, sprang to his feet, dashed out of the door, yelling wildly:
“It’s yours—all yours—yours for keeps!” and disappeared.
“God bless us, Mary,” gasped the old gentleman, as his good housekeeper appeared, 
with consternation written all over her features.4
“There’s something the matter with the boy.”
At this moment Mr. Donaldson walked in and grasped his old friend by the hand.
“What does it mean?” the poet demanded.
“The horse and phaeton are a present from your friends, whose names are on the 
paper,” was the laughing reply.
But Walt Whitman could not grasp the idea that he was the recipient of so valu-
able a present. “Don’t joke me,” he pleaded; “I never owned such a thing in my life.”
It took some time to convince him that the present was for him, and then he put on 
his wide-brimmed sombrero and insisted upon getting into the phaeton and dashing 
out into the green lanes. Mr. Donaldson accompanied him, and after a three-mile 
drive the poet let him out and drove to his old friend, Henry S. Scovel, and insisted 
that Mrs. Scovel ride out behind the wonderful animal.5
It was long after dark before the poet consented to return to his home, and when a 
reporter called at 9 o’clock; the old gentleman was fagged. He was sitting in his great 
armchair beside the window, with the lights turned down. The floor and table were 
still littered with books and papers, and the evening mail was still unopened.
“You don’t know how many good friends I have,” said the bard, as he half rose to 
extend his hand.  Then running his fingers through his silver locks, and rolling back 
his wide collar still further from his throat, he continued:
“I have before now been made to feel in many touching ways how kind and thought-
ful my loving friends are, but this present is so handsome and valuable, came so op-
portunely, and was so thorough a surprise, that I can hardly realize it. My paralysis 
has made me so lame lately that I had to give up even my walks for health let alone my 
rambles in the country, and my constitution has suffered for exercise. It was all done 
so unostentatiously and delicately that I was greatly affected. Tom Donaldson knew 
that I was getting more feeble, and he wrote to a number of friends and admirers of 
mine in different parts of the country, proposing presenting me with a carriage and 
horse to ease my declining years. Some of them I do not know. Some are very dear 
144
friends. Here are their names: John G. Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel L. 
Clemens, (Mark Twain,) Charles Dudley Warner, John Boyle O’Reilly, William J. 
Florence, Edwin Booth, and Lawrence Barrett, Mrs. S. A. Bigelow, of Boston; Horace 
Howard Furness, L. N. Fairchild, E. A. Buck, of the Spirit of the Times; R. W. Gilder, 
of the Century; Edward T. Steel, A. K. McClure, Stephen B. Elkins, Charles Emory 
Smith, Talcott Williams, William D. O’Connor, of Washington; J. H. Bartlett, George 
H. Boker, Edwin S. Stuart, William W. Justice, John Harker, of Exina, Canada, and 
R. M. Buck[e], M.D., and Dr. Beeman, of London, Canada.
“It is an interesting list, isn’t it?” the poet continued. “It seems that this phaeton 
was made for me in Columbus, Ohio, and is as easy and convenient as it can be. It is 
very low in the bed, has gig lamps, and deep cushions.6 Oh, I shall have a famous time 
this Fall! They tell me there are lovely drives south and east of Camden, and there are 
sleepy old villages that I am informed are very like old English hamlets. I shall take 
long drives into the country each day, and once more enjoy nature, if not as I used to, 
at least as deeply and thankfully.”
It is not generally known that the poet was recently in receipt of a considerable 
sum raised among his English admirers by subscription and without his knowledge. 
The gift is said to be about $500 in value, and it was very welcome, coming as it did, 
when Walt Whitman was in financial embarrassment.7
Texas A&M University Jerome loving 
NOTES
1 Thomas Donaldson, Walt Whitman, The Man (New York: Francis P. Harper, 
1896), 174; Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley: University 
of California Press, 1999), 305. 
2 Ed Folsom and Jerome Loving, “The Walt Whitman Controversy: A Lost Docu-
ment,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 83 (Spring, 2007), 123-138. See also Jerome Loving, 
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens (Berkeley: University of California 
Press, 2010), 252-255.
3 Listed in Scott Giantvalley, Walt Whitman, 1839-1939: A Reference Guide (Boston: 
G. K. Hall, 1981), 75. The story of Whitman’s receiving the horse and phaeton also 
appeared on September 15 in the Camden Post and on September 16 in the Philadel-
phia Press and the Boston Herald.
4 Mary O. Davis, the widow of a sea captain and Whitman’s cook and housekeeper 
since 1884.
5 Probably a misprint for James M. Scovel, another lawyer friend who practiced in 
Camden and did small favors for Whitman.
6 Oil lamps designed for a “gig,” or a carriage light enough to be pulled by one horse.
7 Whitman had encouraged financial help not only from his American friends but 
his British supporters as well. Edward Carpenter took up a collection and had recently 
sent the poet fifty pounds, which then amounted to $239.83 (Walt Whitman: The 
Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller [New York: New York University Press, 
1964], 3:399n). 


Whitman Surprised: The Poet in 1885

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Spring 2011

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 28, no. 

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 28, no. 3

Price, Kenneth M.

155
IN MEMORIAM: JAMES E. MILLER, JR.
James E. Miller, Jr., died in 
Chicago on his ninetieth birth-
day, September 9, 2010. An 
Americanist with wide-ranging 
interests, he published books 
on Herman Melville, F. Scott 
Fitzgerald, Henry James, and 
T. S. Eliot.  His longtime work 
on “America Reads,” a litera-
ture series for secondary school 
students with Scott Foresman, 
reached innumerable young 
readers. But he was best known 
for his field-shaping contribu-
tions to Whitman studies.   
Influenced by the then-dom-
inant New Criticism, Miller 
provided incisive analyses of 
Whitman’s poems in essays 
published in PMLA and other 
leading venues. These essays, reworked and supplemented in A Critical Guide to 
Leaves of Grass (Chicago, 1957), highlighted Whitman’s artistry and elevated his 
standing in the academy. Miller promoted Whitman studies in other ways, too, 
with his early analysis of the Whitman tradition, Start with the Sun, co-authored 
with Bernice Slote and Karl Shapiro (Nebraska, 1960); with his overview study 
Walt Whitman (Twayne, 1962); with his illuminating “Song of Myself”—Origin, 
Growth, Meaning (Dodd, Mead, 1964), which presented parallel text versions 
of the 1855 and 1892 texts; and with his groundbreaking study of Whitman’s 
influence on twentieth-century poetry, The American Quest for a Supreme Fic-
tion: Whitman’s Legacy in the Personal Epic (Chicago, 1979).  Miller was a rare 
academic, capable of publishing in the best journals and with the most presti-
gious publishing houses, while also being unpretentious enough to recognize 
the value of a good introductory study and the central importance of teaching 
to academic life (fittingly, he served a term as President of the National Council 
of Teachers of English).  Given his commitments and his love of Whitman, it is 
appropriate that one of Miller’s last contributions to the field was an overview, 
meant especially to benefit those new to Whitman, Leaves of Grass: America’s 
Lyric-Epic of Self and Democracy  (Twayne, 1992).
Born in Oklahoma, Miller served as a cryptographer for the Army during 
World War II.  He later attended the University of Chicago where he earned 
his M.A. and Ph.D.  His early career was spent at the University of Nebraska-
Lincoln where he rose to become chair of the English department at age 
thirty-six. He was called back to join the University of Chicago faculty in 1962. 
He was appointed Helen A. Regenstein Professor of English and served as 
chair of this department from 1978 to 1984. His career had an international 
156
dimension as well: he lectured and taught in numerous European and Asian 
countries. He retired in 1990.
I came to know Miller in the late 1970s, when I was a graduate student at 
Chicago. I took his Poe/Hawthorne/Melville class and later an independent 
study course on Whitman.  Soon thereafter he agreed to direct my dissertation 
on Whitman’s theory of poetry.  It was remarkable that he found time for me 
(the Whitman course was an overload) since he had an ambitious research 
agenda, heavy administrative duties, and, most significantly, his first wife, 
Barbara Anderson, was dying.  There was a moving moment in one of our 
sessions when Miller, who always seemed completely engaged, apologized 
and asked me to repeat something I had said.  It was a moment of distraction, 
and he handled his human frailty and vulnerability with memorable grace 
and candor. Occasionally, he was also known to offer homespun wisdom, as 
when he advised me, some years later, “never to accept a job until it has been 
offered to you.”
Miller was honored as one of four Centennial Scholars at the University 
of Iowa Whitman Centennial Conference in 1992, and, after remaining ac-
tive beyond others in his generation of Whitman scholars, he was honored 
as the lone Whitman Sesquicentennial Scholar in 2005 at the University of 
Nebraska-Lincoln conference commemorating the 150th anniversary of the 
first publication of Leaves of Grass. During that Nebraska conference, Miller 
and his second wife, Kathleen Farley, learned that the suitcase of a Whitman 
scholar from China, Liu Shusen, was torn beyond repair while in transport 
to the conference.  It was only last year that I learned from Shusen that Jim 
and Kathleen gave him one of their own suitcases for his return trip to China. 
The generosity was characteristic of them both.
Readers of this journal are students of the nineteenth century, an era when 
many believed in the possibility of the good death (with the Civil War bringing 
death in unprecedented numbers to people in the prime of life, the belief may 
have become an emotional, spiritual, psychological necessity).  We live in a very 
different age, of course, and the idea of the good death is no longer a prominent 
part of our culture, if it exists at all. I suspect many of us are skeptical that there 
can be a good death.  In the loss of Jim Miller, a loss presaged by several years 
of decline into Alzheimer’s disease, we wonder again at the decay brought by 
time.  To the end, Jim recognized his beloved Kathleen, and for that we can 
be thankful. Kathleen notes that at the end of his days, when many memories 
had been erased, he would gaze at the long array of books bearing his name 
and delight in repeating “I read books, I taught books, I wrote books. I can’t 
live without writing a book.” Even as he lost track of the world, he continued 
to know himself.  Whatever we make of such mysteries, we can take some 
solace in knowing that Jim Miller died in his home surrounded by the love of 
his children and wife Kathleen. I’ve been told that they held hands and sang 
“Happy Birthday” at his death. That’s a little unconventional, perhaps, but 
maybe it was exactly fitting: it was his birthday after all, and his was a birth 
and a life worth celebrating, even and especially on the occasion of his death. 
—Kenneth M. Price, University of Nebraska-Lincoln


In Memoriam: James E. Miller, Jr.

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 29, no. 1

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