Correspondent:
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). Apparently Kennedy had 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).

Notes:

1. William Shepherd Walsh's Pen Pictures of Modern Authors (1882), 161–177, included a reprint of Conway's article in The Fortnightly Review in 1866 (see the letter from Walt to Louisa Van Velsor Whitman of November 13, 1866) and "a flashy bit of Bohemian literature by 'Jay Charlton,'" the pen name of J. C. Goldsmith (see William Sloane Kennedy, The Fight of a Book for the World, 55); this piece offered an impression of Whitman among the New York Bohemians at Pfaff's beer cellar and characterized the poet's "yawps" as "wretched failures" because "his Pegasus is a mad bull, dashing furiously into swamps, ditches, and dung-hills, and then frightening literature by shaking his muddy horns at it." Kennedy on August 18 agreed to omit both articles. [back]