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Medical Superintendent's
Office.
INSANE ASYLUM
LONDON ONTARIO1
11 June 1891
Last night and today we have had a hard rain which was much needed. It is still dark and threatening. Your
post card of 9th2 came to hand this morning and we were glad that you were no
worse. H3 & I are hard at all sorts of W.W. plans and speculations. H. has got his
Lippencott "Round Table"
piece in pretty good shape,4 it will be A.I.—We have pretty well
planned our W.W. book5 also—H. will show you the list of pieces which are to go in it when he
returns. It will all have to be approved by you.
Tomorrow I think we shall all go for a 15 mile drive to Delaware—H., Anne,6
Mrs.B.,7 my boy Maurice,8 self, & it should be splendid driving
after the rain
Best love
R M Bucke
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Correspondent:
Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) was a
Canadian physician and psychiatrist who grew close to Whitman after reading Leaves of Grass in 1867 (and later memorizing it) and
meeting the poet in Camden a decade later. Even before meeting Whitman, Bucke
claimed in 1872 that a reading of Leaves of Grass led him
to experience "cosmic consciousness" and an overwhelming sense of epiphany.
Bucke became the poet's first biographer with Walt
Whitman (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1883), and he later served as one
of his medical advisors and literary executors. For more on the relationship of
Bucke and Whitman, see Howard Nelson, "Bucke, Richard Maurice," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes
- 1. This letter is addressed:
Walt Whitman | 328 Mickle Street | Camden | New Jersey | U.S.A. It is
postmarked: LONDON | [illegible] | JU
11 | 91 | CANADA; CAMDEN, N.J. | JUN | 12 | 6PM | 1891 | REC'D. [back]
- 2. See Whitman's June 9, 1891, postal card to Bucke. [back]
- 3. Horace L. Traubel (1858–1919)
was an American essayist, poet, and magazine publisher. He is best remembered as
the literary executor, biographer, and self-fashioned "spirit child" of Walt
Whitman. During the late 1880s and until Whitman's death in 1892, Traubel visited
the poet virtually every day and took thorough notes of their conversations,
which he later transcribed and published in three large volumes entitled With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906, 1908, & 1914).
After his death, Traubel left behind enough manuscripts for six more volumes of
the series, the final two of which were published in 1996. For more on Traubel,
see Ed Folsom, "Traubel, Horace L. [1858–1919]," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 4. Horace Traubel's "Walt
Whitman's Birthday, May 31, 1891," an account of Whitman's 72nd (and last)
birthday, was published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine
in August 1891. The account was later published as "Round Table with Walt Whitman" in Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and
Thomas B. Harned, ed., In Re Walt Whitman (Philadelphia:
David McKay, 1893), 297–328. [back]
- 5. Horace Traubel and Canadian
physician Richard Maurice Bucke were beginning to make plans for a collected
volume of writings by and about Whitman. Bucke, Traubel, and Thomas
Harned—Whitman's three literary executors—edited In Re Walt Whitman (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1893), which included
the three unsigned reviews of the first edition of Leaves of
Grass that were written by Whitman himself, William Sloane Kennedy's
article, "Dutch Traits of Walt Whitman," and Robert Ingersoll's lecture Liberty in Literature (delivered in honor of Whitman at
Philadelphia's Horticultural Hall on October 21, 1890), as well as writings by
the naturalist John Burroughs and by James W. Wallace, a co-founder of the
Bolton Whitman Fellowship in Bolton, England. [back]
- 6. Anne Montgomerie
(1864–1954) married Horace Traubel in Whitman's Mickle Street house in
Camden, New Jersey, in 1891. They had one daughter, Gertrude (1892–1983),
and one son, Wallace (1893–1898). Anne was unimpressed with Whitman's work
when she first read it, but later became enraptured by what she called its
"pulsating, illumined life," and she joined Horace as associate editor of his
Whitman-inspired periodical The Conservator. Anne edited
a small collection of Whitman's writings, A Little Book of
Nature Thoughts (Portland, Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1896). After
Horace's death, both Anne and Gertrude edited his manuscripts of his
conversations with Whitman during the final four years of the poet's life, which
eventually became the nine-volume With Walt Whitman in
Camden. [back]
- 7. Jessie Maria Gurd Bucke
(1839–1926) grew up in Mooretown, Upper Canada. She was the daughter of
William Gurd, an army officer from Ireland. Gurd married Richard Maurice Bucke
in 1865. The couple had eight children. [back]
- 8. Maurice Andrews Bucke
(1868–1899) was the oldest son of Richard Maurice Bucke and his wife
Jessie Gurd Bucke. Maurice, named after his father, died in Montana in a
carriage accident when he was thirty-one years old. [back]