The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to William Sloane Kennedy, 22 August 1890
Date: August 22, 1890
Whitman Archive ID: med.00930
Source: Edwin Haviland Miller derives his transcription of this letter from a photostat in the possession of Prof. Gay Wilson Allen. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 5:74. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Andrew David King, Cristin Noonan, and Stephanie Blalock
Camden
Aug: 22, '90
Thanks for Wednesday's Herald1—& indeed for all papers &c:—the calamus lozenges2 come [on] an occasion (rec'd quite a while ago)—Am well as usual—eat &c: heartily—hot weather here—plenty wet—am anchor'd helpless here all day but get along fairly—fortunately have a placid, quiet, even solitary thread quite strong in the weft of my disposition—
Walt Whitman
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). Apparently Kennedy had 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. "Walt Whitman's Art," with quotations from Whitman's brief essay "An Old Man's Rejoinder," appeared in the Boston Herald on August 20. [back]
2. Kennedy occasionaly sent Whitman treats that Mrs. Kennedy had made, including "calamus sugar plums" and "calamus lozenges." [back]