Lubbock resident Abbie Kleppa has known for decades about the letter Walt Whitman had written to a distant relative in her family. Whitman, who 200th birthday is this year, wrote it in 1863 in a Washington, DC hospital for a young soldier who was a foster child to the relative.
“My mom kept it tucked away in the back of a closet with a bunch of letters from her grandmother, and her grandmother had been sort of a keeper of the family history with items to pass down. My mom had all these letters, and I remember being showed “Oh, this is from Walt Whitman.” I mean I remember every once in a while asking, “Can we go look at the Walt Whitman letter!” I knew he was famous as a poet and I knew that he had worked in these hospitals during the Civil War because that was part of the explanation.”
The letter was penned by Whitman for a gravely ill young Albion Hubbard as Hubbard lay in a Union hospital. Hubbard grew up as a foster child to Kleppa’s mother’s great-great-great-grandfather on their farm in Massachusetts.
The Hubbard letter is one of only three written by Whitman for ill soldiers discovered to date.
About six years ago, Kleppa took the letter to the Antiques Road Show in Chicago. She got the letter authenticated and it’s worth appraised at somewhere between $8,000 and $12,000. Kleppa has no interest in selling the letter.
After that appearance on the PBS show, Kleppa heard from The Walt Whitman Archive. She’s subsequently learned that Whitman had reference the Hubbard letter in his handwritten notes.
“And it says “I wrote a letter to the family he lives with” and that’s what essentially really sort of highlights and it sort of validates the whole letter, gives it more context. So this little reference also talks about how this young man, it sounds like he had horrible bed sores, and he had wounds that were closed now but were stuffed with rags, is what Whitman writes. So this was a very sick young man, and of course it’s just a few days before he dies.”
Texas Tech’s Southwest Collection/ Special Collections Library has copies of numerous editions of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” seen as the first truly American book of poetry.
Bruce Cammack, associate librarian for rare books at the Southwest Collections/Special Collections Library at Tech, tells me the importance of the book’s first edition to American literary history is difficult to exaggerate.
The 1855 edition was marked by controversy and TTU’s copy, Cammack says, reflects this. A number of lines are marked through in what appears to be an effort to censor.
Cammack says the core of Whitman collection on campus consists of at least one copy of all six editions of his masterpiece, which grew from a 95-page volume of about 12 unnamed poems to more than 400 poems.
Kleppa worked with Marta Kvande (KWAN-duh) in the English Department to help to organize Tuesday’s celebration of Whitman’s birthday in the Formby Room at the Southwest Collections/Special Collections Library at 3:30 p.m.
“I mean, you know, all this time I’ve never really taken this huge interest in Whitman. I’ve had more interest in recent times to learn more about him, to have more understanding of why he’s such an important figure in American literature, in Civil War history, and so it’s still a journey of exploration.”
Kleppa says there’s been additional benefit to sharing the Whitman letter openly.
“Now my kids are interested in this too, I will say that that’s one of the benefits of having taken this on the Road Show is now they are paying more attention to the family history and the lore that my great grandmother was trying to pass on all this time, and then to my mom, etc. so at this point it’s the thing that sort of helps draw in the next generation.”