Dante Gabriel Rossetti. portrait of his brother. pen on wove paper, 1853
My Dear Walt,
Forgive me the familiarity of using your first name, but I cannot go on calling you My Dear Whitman, it just won’t do. Well it is all in the hands of Chatto now and the proofs look splendid and the expectations are such that all of London is talking about you and your ‘rough’ poetry, how they will be surprised when they read your genius. Yes, I do believe you to be that rare breed (sadly there are too many in London at the moment, but they soon tire and are sooner still forgotten!). But I believe it is thus true in your case, and as Shelley wrote, and he knew a thing or two, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, and you my dear Walt are marked out in a peculiar degree for legislation. Your voice will one day be magisterial wherever the English language is spoken — that is to say in the four corners of the earth, and in America you will be confessed their inspirer.
Yours truly,
W. M. Rossetti
Having read Walt’s Leaves of Grass in 1855 (the year of its US self-publication by Whitman)Rossetti immediately began to champion the work of Whitman, leaving no publisher undisturbed in his attempts to see the American in print. He was not helped by his brother Dante’s hatred of Whitman’s work, which is strange when you consider just how similar they are in expression and emotion.
It would take William thirteen years to achieve his aim, with the Poems of Walt Whitman finally published in 1868 by Chatto and Windus, with William as editor, who writes a splendid thirty page preface, that has two lovely sentences near the beginning:
“ The Americans, of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem…”
