ABSTRACT
Extract from Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Contemporaries (1899), p. 83.
Higginson (1823–1911), the friend and editor of Emily Dickinson, was a prolific writer, a clergyman, editor of the Atlantic Monthly and a colonel, commanding the first black regiment during the Civil War. He was an early reader of Whitman and must have mentioned him in his reply to Miss Dickinson s first letter to him (15 April 1862), for on 25 April we find her writing to him: ‘You speak of Mr. Whitman—I never read his Book—but was told that he was disgraceful—’
