from: Oscar Wilde to: Walt Whitman (1882)

Transcription:

Before I leave America I must see you again--there is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honour so much. With warm affection, and honourable admiration, Oscar Wilde.

Whitman and Oscar Wilde:

In January and May 1882 the Irish writer Oscar Wilde visited Whitman at his home in Camden, New Jersey. He told the poet that his mother had read Leaves of Grass to him as a child, and that his Oxford friends carried the book with them on their strolls. Whitman was delighted with Wilde, whom he described as "a fine large handsome youngster." Wilde, in America on a lecture tour, sent a portrait taken at the New York studio of Napoleon Sarony to Whitman as a keepsake. Wilde was one of the many artists and intellectuals who made pilgrimages to Whitman's door in the poet's later years.

Revising Himself - Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (Manuscripts, images, ephemera, the works in this Library of Congress exhibit.)

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