Have just read the piece of our little spectacled brother Symond2 on W W. As before his plain utterance seemed to you, so now to me. This seems somehow comic—so inadequate is it & "off." Yet there is some good weft in the shoddy—a little. S. lacks healthy contact with the live world. Did you ever hear that the Booths3 were of Dutch origin? Mrs K.4 is sure she read it. I have searched all the books in vain, tho' I find a little Welsh blood in their family. What curious blood—heating broad-fanned South winds! Have been dipping into Boccaccio.5 He is a healthy fellow, but his stories are too much for any flesh. My imagination is too vivid. I have to throw him aside.
W. S. K. loc.03082.001.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).