Just1 picked a sweet— brier twig—wild—back of home. More fit to send you than cultivated roses. I dipped into Song of Myself yesterday. Am always awed by the power & superhuman worth of that greatest of poems yet made. If it were not so very great it wd make me envious! I sent three lines—just—to Gardner2 of Paisley—yesterday, asking him if I had missed a letter fr. him, that I had not heard since April.
affec. yr friend W. S. Kennedy.Am reading Mahaffy's Rambles in Greece,3 good writer4
loc.03015.001.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).