The long MS you sent me some months since is all right & I will return it to you forthwith—The whole drift of it is lofty, subtle & true—I would not put it out by itself—Such things never strike in so well in the abstract as in illustration, of some definite personal, critical concrete thing.—I suggest to you a criticism on Tennyson and Walt Whitman (or if you prefer on Victor Hugo, T and WW) where they should be work'd in—What think you?1
W W rut.00005.002_large.jpgCorrespondent:
William Sloane Kennedy
(1850–1929) was on the staff of the Philadelphia American and the Boston Transcript; he also
published biographies of Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier (Dictionary of American Biography [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933], 336–337). Apparently Kennedy called on
the poet for the first time on November 21, 1880 (William Sloane Kennedy, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman [London: Alexander
Gardener, 1896], 1). Though Kennedy was to become a fierce defender of Whitman,
in his first published article he admitted reservations about the "coarse
indecencies of language" and protested that Whitman's ideal of democracy was
"too coarse and crude"; see The Californian, 3 (February
1881), 149–158. For more about Kennedy, see Katherine Reagan, "Kennedy, William Sloane (1850–1929)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).