The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to William Sloane Kennedy and Richard Maurice Bucke, 28 July 1887
Date: July 28, 1887
Whitman Archive ID: med.00806
Source: The location of this manuscript is unknown. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 4:112. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Ashland, Stefan Schöberlein, Caterina Bernardini, and Stephanie Blalock
July 28/871
Had for dinner stewed blackberries—a favorite tipple of mine—and boiled rice. . . . Sidney Morse2 has made a second big head—an improvement, if I dare say so, on the first. The second is the modern spirit, awake & alert as well as calm—contrasted with the antique & Egyptian calmness & rest of the first. We have decided on the second.
Correspondent:
William Sloane Kennedy and Richard
Maurice Bucke were two of Whitman's closest friends and admirers. Kennedy
(1850–1929) first met Whitman while on the staff of the Philadelphia American in 1880. He became a fierce defender of Whitman
and would go on to write a book-length study of the poet. 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). Bucke (1837–1902), a Canadian physician,
was Whitman's first biographer, and would later become 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. Miller derived his transcription from Kennedy's transcript (Trent). [back]
2. Sidney H. Morse (1832–1903) was a self-taught sculptor as well as a Unitarian minister and, from 1866 to 1872, editor of The Radical. He visited Whitman in Camden many times and made various busts of him. Whitman had commented on an earlier bust by Morse that it was "wretchedly bad." For more on this, see Ruth L. Bohan, Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850–1920 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 105–109. [back]