Washington D.C.,
April 14, 1888.
Dear Walt:
All echoes are delightful, especially such as this one: I was sitting at breakfast
yesterday morning, when the lines came into my head which someone has written of
Milton:
"Chief of organic numbers,
Old poet of the spheres—"1
And I thought how much more applicable they were to you than to Milton. Just then the
postman rang and left me your letter of the 12th!2 This
may have been an Irish echo, but all the same an echo.
I was very glad to hear from you. I have been longing to send you a word, but you
can't imagine how hard it is for me to rouse myself to write, in my condition of
lameness and lethargy. I have lately been undergoing massage,
and it certainly was doing me good, but about the first of the month my poor
massager, a sturdy young German, fell ill with typhoid fever, and I am now sliding
backward.
Today is your day for talking about Mr. Lincoln, but I suppose you will not.
April 16.—I was interrupted here, and could not resume until now. I must
certainly try to write to Dr. Bucke.3 His visit here en route to
Florida was very pleasant. I am glad to hear that Kennedy's4
book is to come out. I tried to get him some subscribers here, but, alas! my
wretched lameness prevents me from exerting myself as I want to. Stedman5 was here during the Authors' week, and told me he had
subscribed, which was good of him. He spent an evening with us and spoke of you with
enthusiasm. I read over lately, for the first time, his article on you as it appears
in the book, and find he has greatly improved it, making many excisions and
modifications. It gratified me to see that my talk with him after the magazine
article came out had impressed him. His face is Zionward, and he will be a credit to
the family yet. He gave me a beautiful account of your last reading of the Lincoln
Memorial—the look at the theater, the magic scene of you on the stage
inorbed by the light of the lamp on the table, the little girl coming up to you with
the basket of flowers, &c., &c. It must all have been very charming.
I did not even know that you were writing little pieces for the Herald6 until some
time after you had begun; then I got the back numbers as far as I could, and cut out
the pieces, but could not get them all. So I shall be glad to see them in November
Boughs. I should like to know what arrangement Bennett made with you, whether it
still continues, &c. I am all in the dark about it. And what is the meaning of
this onslaught that Tucker7 makes on you in Liberty—Tucker, who did such
yeoman's service for us in the fight with Oliver Stevens and Company? I don't
understand it at all. I hope you have not been writing anything in praise of that
old dead werewolf, Emperor William. It would be an awful mistake. His was a black
record. I cannot help thinking that Tucker has made some egregious blunder, but I
have no light on the matter at all.
Donnelly's8 book is announced for May, the printer's strike in
Chicago having delayed it. All is blooming for him. He is now in England, and there
is a good deal of excitement about him. The delay in publication has enabled him to
translate about fifty pages more of the cipher for his volume, which is a decided
gain for the true believer. Despite my illness and inanition, I am all agog for the
result.
"O for the light of another sun,
With my Bazra sword in my hand!"9
Donnelly has made lately a remarkable discovery—that the two folio editions of
the play following the edition of 1623, at intervals of nine and twelve years
respectively, long after Bacon's10 death, are absolute facsimiles
of the first, even the same number of words on each page being preserved. As
stereotype did not then exist, these editions were manifestly in each case reset,
which could only have been done in this way with great painstaking: and it proves
that somebody in the interest of Bacon was alive and busy in preserving carefully
the form of the original folio! This is a swashing blow for the Shakespeareans!
What an idyl of your room you opened to me in your flash of description—you in
the big chair, the window open to the sunset, the Easter lilies on the sill, and the
little bird singing his furious carol! It was quite divine. How I wish you could get
active and well!
If Nelly11 knew I were writing she would surely send you her love.
She has not been very well this spring—colds being rampant with everyone.
Good-bye, dear Walt—that is, au revoir. I hope you will keep fairly well at any
rate, and that I shall see you before long.
Always affectionately,
W. D. O'Connor.
Correspondent:
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).
Notes
- 1. John Keats's "Lines on
Seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair" (1818) begins, "Chief of organic Numbers! / Old
Scholar of the Spheres!" [back]
- 2. See Whitman's letter to
O'Connor of April 12, 1888. [back]
- 3. 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). [back]
- 4. 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). [back]
- 5. Edmund Clarence Stedman
(1833–1908) was a man of diverse talents. He edited for a year the Mountain County Herald at Winsted, Connecticut, wrote
"Honest Abe of the West," presumably Lincoln's first campaign song, and served
as correspondent of the New York World from 1860 to 1862.
In 1862 and 1863 he was a private secretary in the Attorney General's office
until he entered the firm of Samuel Hallett and Company in September, 1863. The
next year he opened his own brokerage office. He published many volumes of poems
and was an indefatigable compiler of anthologies, among which were Poets of America, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1885) and A Library of American Literature from the Earliest
Settlement to the Present Time, 11 vols. (New York: C. L. Webster,
1889–90). For more, see Donald Yannella, "Stedman, Edmund Clarence (1833–1908)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 6. In late 1887, James Gordon Bennett,
Jr., editor of the New York Herald, invited Whitman to
contribute a series of poems and prose pieces for the paper. From December 1887
through August 1888, 33 of Whitman's poems appeared. [back]
- 7. Benjamin R. Tucker was a
translator, editor, and friend of writer John Ruskin. On May 25, 1882, Tucker offered to act as Whitman's publisher in order
to test the Boston banning of Leaves of Grass (Horace
Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Monday, September 3, 1888, 253–254). As editor of Liberty, he followed the Boston controversy closely in
editorial comments on May 27, June 10, and July 22. In the July issue, he
printed an advertisement in which he offered to sell and mail Leaves of Grass to any purchaser, and informed Stevens, Marston,
Tobey, and Comstock, all of whom were mentioned by name, that he was willing to
have his offer tested in the courts. On August 19, he commented: "We have
offered to meet the enemy, but the enemy declines to be met. . . . We still
advertise the book for sale, and sell it openly and rapidly." The advertisement
appeared again on September 16. For more information on the controversy, see
Joseph P. Hammond, "Stevens, Oliver (b. 1825)" and "Comstock, Anthony (1844–1919)," Walt Whitman:
An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 8. Ignatius Loyola Donnelly
(1831–1901) was a politician and writer, well known for his notions of
Atlantis as an antediluvian civilization and for his belief that Shakespeare's
plays had been written by Francis Bacon, an idea he argued in his book The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in Shakespeare's
Plays, published in 1888. [back]
- 9. James Clarence Mangan's
translation of Friedrick August von Heyden's "The Last Words of Al-Hassan"
contains the lines "O Allah, for the light of another sun, / With my Bazra sword
in hand!" Mangan's translation was published in the Dublin
University Magazine in 1845 and frequently reprinted during the
nineteenth century. [back]
- 10. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was
an English philosopher, scientist, statesman, and author. Bacon's personal
notebooks and works came under scrutiny during the nineteenth-century because of
suspicions that he had written plays under the pen-name William Shakespeare in
order to protect his political office from material some might find
objectionable. For more on the Baconian theory, see Henry William Smith, Was Lord Bacon The Author of Shakespeare's Plays?: A Letter to
Lord Ellesmere (London: William Skeffington, 1856). [back]
- 11. Ellen M. "Nelly" O'Connor (1830–1913) was the
wife of William D. O'Connor (1832–1889), one of Whitman's staunchest
defenders. Before marrying William, Ellen Tarr was active in the antislavery and
women's rights movements as a contributor to the Liberator and to a women's rights newspaper Una. Whitman dined with the O'Connors frequently during his Washington
years. Though Whitman and William O'Connor would temporarily break off their
friendship in late 1872 over Reconstruction policies with regard to emancipated
African Americans, Ellen would remain friendly with Whitman. The correspondence
between Whitman and Ellen is almost as voluminous as the poet's correspondence
with William. Three years after William O'Connor's death, Ellen married the
Providence businessman Albert Calder. For more on Whitman's relationship with the O'Connors, see Dashae
E. Lott, "O'Connor, William Douglas [1832–1889]" and Lott's "O'Connor (Calder),
Ellen ('Nelly') M. Tarr (1830–1913)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]