The "Magazine of Poetry" reach'd Dr B[ucke]1 all right—I expect him here by Wednesday next—(he expects to practically start that meter company & manufacturing)2—O'C[onnor]3 is still very ill—he is yet eager that his late essay backing the pro-Bacon anti-Shaksperean argument sh'd be publish'd4—I hope so too—
Nothing very new with me—Am somewhat worse, (side-pains day & night)—There is a good notice in London Pall-Mall Jan: 255—Sunny & very cold here—
Walt WhitmanCorrespondent:
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).