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  My dear Sir,

Your letter of 22 Novr. reached me the other day thro' Mr. Conway. You no doubt will by this time have received the one I addressed to you 2 or 3 weeks ago; but perhaps it may occur to me to repeat here some things said in that letter. I think the most convenient course may be for me first to state the facts about my Selection.

Some while back—I suppose   before the middle of Septr.—Mr. Hotten the publisher told me that he projected bringing out a selection from your poems, & (in consequence of my review in the Chronicle) he asked whether I wd. undertake to make the selection, & write any such prefatory matter as I mt. think desirable. Proud to associate myself in any way with your writings, or to subserve their diffusion & appreciation here, I gladly consented.

I at once re-read thro' your last complete edition, & made the selection. In doing this I was guided by two rules—1, to omit entirely every poem wh. contains   passages or words wh. modern squeamishness can raise an objection to—& 2, to include, from among the remaining poems, those wh. I most entirely & intensely admire. The bulk of poems thus selected is rather less than half the bulk of your complete edition; &, before my selection went to the printer's hands, I had the advantage of revising it by the corrected copy you sent some while ago to Mr. Conway. I also added the prose Preface to Leaves of Grass—obtaining thro' Mr. Conway your permission to alter (or rather, as I have done, simply to omit) 2 or 3 phrases in that Preface (only). Thus my selection is a verbatim   reproduction of a good number of your poems, unaccompanied by the remainder. There is no curtailment or alteration whatever—& no modification at all except in these 3 particulars—

1. I have given a note here & there:

2. I have thought it better, considering the difference of a selection from the sum-total, to re-distribute the poems into 5 classes, which I have termed—Chants Democratic—Drum Taps—Walt Whitman—Leaves of Grass—Songs of Parting:

3. I have given titles to many poems wh. in your editions are merely headed with the words of the opening line.

 

The selection being thus made, I wrote a Prefatory Notice & Dedicatory Letter; & then consigned the whole affair to the publisher & printer, somewhere in the earlier days of October. My prefatory matter, & something like a third (I suppose) of the poems, were in print before your letter of 1 Novr., addressed to Mr. Conway, reached me; & now the Preface to Leaves of Grass is also in print, & I fancy the whole thing ought to be completed & out by Xmas, or very soon after.

The letter wh. I wrote you on receipt of yours of 1 Novr. said that I was about to consult the   publisher as to dropping the mere selection, & substituting a complete edition, only with slight verbal modifications. This however the publisher proved unwilling to do, the selection being so far advanced, advertised, &c. Therefore the selection will come out exactly as first put together; & on reflection this pleased me decidedly better.

I now proceed to reply to the details of your letter of 22 Novr.

If any blockhead chooses to call my selection "an expurgated edition," that lie shall be on his own head, not mine. My Prefatory Notice explains my principle of selection to exactly the same effect as given in this present letter; &   contains moreover a longish passage affirming that, if such freedom of speech as you adopt were denied to others, all the great literature of the whole world wd. be castrated or condemned.

The form of title–page wh. you propose wd. of course be adopted by me with thanks & without a moment's debate, were it not that my own title–page was previously in print: I enclose a copy. I trust you may see nothing in it to disapprove—as indeed in essentials it comes to much the same as your own model. However, I have already written to the publisher, suggesting that he shd. decide, according to the conveniences   of the printing arrangements, which of the two shall eventually appear.

In making my selection, I preserved all (I believe all) "the larger figures dividing the pieces into separate passages or sections," but did not preserve the numbers of the stanzas,—the separation of stanzas, however, continuing as in your edition. I am sorry now that I did not meet your preference in this respect, & that the printing has already proceeded too far for me to revert to the small numbers now. My wish was to get rid of anything of a merely external kind wh. ordinary readers wd. call peculiar or eccentric. Parrot–like repetitions   of that charge have been too numerous already.

I need scarcely assure you that that most glorious poem on Lincoln is included in my Selection. It shall appear with your title "President Lincoln's Funeral Hymn." I had previously given it a title of my own, "Nocturn for the Death of Lincoln"; & in my Prefatory Notice it is alluded to under that title. A note of explanation shall be given.

I await with impatience the receipt of your paper on Democracy. It will find in me no reluctant hearer, as I have always been a democratic republican, & hope to live & die faithful to the   meanings of that glorious creed. The other printed matter you have so kindly sent me I received two evenings back from Mr. Conway. The newspaper articles are new to me: with the publications of Mr. O'Connor & Mr. Burroughs I was already familiar, & I entertain a real respect for those publications & their writers.

Believe me, I am grateful to you for your kindness in these matters, & for the indulgent eye with which you look upon a project which perhaps, after all, you wd. rather had never been entered upon. I am in some hopes that your indulgence will not   be diminished when you see what the selection itself actually looks like. In consequence of the correspondence wh. has passed since the selection was made, I may possibly find occasion to add a brief P.S.: it shall contain nothing you cd. object to. If the selection aids the general body of English poetical readers to understand that there really is a great poet across the Atlantic, & to demand a complete & unmutilated edition, my desires connected with the selection will be accomplished.

Believe me, dear Sir, with the deepest respect, Yours, W. M. Rossetti.