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Trans. Office—1
Frid
Dear Walt
I did not realize that you were so ill. Accept deep sympathy
Nor did I realize that the booklet2 was so far along Yes, the lines appeared
in Youth's Companion3—4
lines.4
Wifekin5 sends love & sympathy.
I am quite worn by the hard winter & by work; but am so so.
I must send you a jug of orange wine—three years
old—when I get round to it. I see O'Connor's6 Android7 has place of honor in Atlantic monthly8 just out. I must
read it.
affec.
WS Kennedy
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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 [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).
Notes
- 1. Kennedy was a frequent
contributor to The Boston Evening Transcript. [back]
- 2. Whitman's book Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) was his last miscellany, and it
included both poetry and short prose works commenting on poetry, aging, and
death, among other topics. Thirty-one poems from the book were later printed as
"Good-Bye my Fancy" in Leaves of Grass
(1891–1892), the last edition of Leaves of Grass
published before Whitman's death in March 1892. For more information see, Donald
Barlow Stauffer, "'Good-Bye my Fancy' (Second Annex) (1891)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 3. The Youth's Companion, a weekly magazine for families and children, was
founded by Nathaniel Willis in 1827. During its more than one-hundred-year run,
the magazine published contributions by Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. For more on the Youth's
Companion, see Susan Belasco, Youth's Companion. [back]
- 4. Kennedy appears to be
responding to a question Whitman posed in a previous letter, but the extant
letters from the poet to Kennedy preceding this one do not include such a
question. Kennedy might be referring to Whitman's five-line poem, "Ship Ahoy!," which appeared in The Youth's
Companion (March 12, 1891): 152. [back]
- 5. Kennedy's wife was Adeline
Ella Lincoln (d. 1923) of Cambridge, Massachusetts. They married on June 17,
1883. The couple's son Mortimer died in infancy. [back]
- 6. William Douglas O'Connor
(1832–1889) was the author of the grand and grandiloquent Whitman pamphlet
The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, published in 1866.
For more on Whitman's relationship with O'Connor, see Deshae E. Lott, "O'Connor, William Douglas (1832–1889)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 7. First written in 1862 but
not published until 1891, William D. O'Connor's story "The Brazen Android"
appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in two installments:
Part 1, vol. 67, no. 402, April 1891, pp. 433–454; Part 2, vol. 67, no.
403, May 1891, pp. 577–599. The story also appeared in the collection Three Tales: The Ghost, The Brazen Android, The Carpenter
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1892), for which Whitman wrote the Preface (which he
later included in Good-Bye My Fancy [Philadelphia: David
McKay, 1891], 51–53). [back]
- 8. The Atlantic Monthly, founded
in 1857 in Boston, was during Walt Whitman's lifetime a prestigious literary
magazine, in which Whitman published two poems: "Bardic Symbols" and "Proud Music of the Sea-Storm." For more on Whitman's relationship
with the magazine, see Susan Belasco's "The Atlantic Monthly." [back]