Administrative Information

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Preferred Citation

Letter from Edwin Percy Whipple, Accession # 7321-e, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Acquisition Information

This holding was purchased on September 4, 1991.

Scope and Content Information

In this letter to Paul Hamilton Hayne, Edwin Percy Whipple, of Boston, expresses his ideas about friendship to his good friend Hayne and apologizes for not answering his letters in a more timely fashion. He mentions that Harper & Brothers persuaded him to write a retrospect of American literature for the past one hundred years, which was published first in Harper's Magazine and then in a book entitled, The First Century of the Republic: A Review of American Progress . He says that he has already spent a month in his research on the subject but fears that he has not done justice to Southern poetry which also appears to be neglected by the Southerners themselves in favor of political literature. He states, "Besides, your cultivated men belong to the old school of Queen Anne and not to the new school of the 19th century." He asks Hayne to give him hints as to any poet of genius in the South that he might overlook, in addition to the names of Hayne, Henry Timrod, and William Gilmore Sims, and wants to know which of his own poems Hayne thinks is his best work.