Cook’s illustrations for a stunning rare edition of Leaves of Grass. With truest wishes for your health and happiness believe meīram Stoker. If you do I shall only be too happy to send you news of how thought goes among the men I know. I do not know if you like getting letters. We had arranged to have a meeting for you. Many of us are hoping to see you in Ireland. Dowden promised to get me a copy of your new edition and I hope that for any other work which you may have you will let me always be an early subscriber. I only hope we may sometime meet and I shall be able perhaps to say what I cannot write. We have just had tonight a hot debate on your genius at the Fortnightly Club in which I had the privilege of putting forward my views - I think with success. I write this openly because I feel that with you one must be open. The years which have passed have not been uneventful to me, and I have felt and thought and suffered much in them, and I can truly say that from you I have had much pleasure and much consolation - and I do believe that your open earnest speech has not been thrown away on me or that my life and thought fail to be marked with its impress. But I am glad to say that I have been the means of making your work known to many who were scoffers at first. You know what hostile criticism your work sometimes evokes here, and I wage a perpetual war with many friends on your behalf. The four years which have elapsed have made me love your work fourfold, and I can truly say that I have ever spoken as your friend. It is as truly what I wanted to say as that light is light. It speaks for itself and needs no comment. Four years ago I wrote the enclosed draft of a letter which I intended to copy out and send to you - it has lain in my desk since then - when I heard that you were addressed as Mr. And as an old friend I send you an enclosure which may interest you. My friend Edward Dowden has told me often that you like new acquaintances or I should rather say friends. Indeed, I hardly feel a stranger to you, nor is this the first letter that I have written to you. I hope you will not consider this letter from an utter stranger a liberty. Stoker - now twenty-eight and finally a published author of three short stories that had appeared in a couple of English and Irish magazines - writes: Skal’s Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula ( public library). Both epistles were published for the first time in David J. Then, on Valentine’s Day 1876, Stoker finally wrote to Whitman, enclosing with his new letter the unsent outpouring. For four years, it haunted his desk, part muse and part goblin. Stoker would later recount that ever since that initial enchantment, he had been wishing to pour out his heart in such a way “but was, somehow, ashamed or diffident - the qualities are much alike.” In February of 1872, the time for this effusion of enchantment seemed to have come.īut it was a fleeting moment of courage - Stoker couldn’t bring himself to mail his extraordinary letter. He had fallen under Whitman’s spell when Leaves of Grass made its belated debut in England in 1868, with Whitman’s stunning preface to the 1855 edition. Long before William James coined the notion of stream of consciousness, Stoker poured forth a long stream of sentiment cascading through various emotions - surging confidence bordering on hubris, delicate self-doubt, absolute artist-to-artist adoration - channeled with the breathless intensity of a love letter, without interruption. Still months away from his first published short story, he composed a stunning letter of admiration and adoration to his great literary idol: Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892). A quarter century before his now-classic epistolary novel Dracula catapulted Abraham “Bram” Stoker (November 8, 1847–April 20, 1912) into literary celebrity, the twenty-four-year-old aspiring author used the epistolary form for a masterpiece of a different order.
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