The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to William Sloane Kennedy, 26 February [1891]
Date: February 26, [1891]
Whitman Archive ID: med.00937
Source: The location of the original manuscript is unknown. Miller derives his transcription from a transcript of the letter published in William Sloane Kennedy's book Reminiscences of Walt Whitman (London: Alexander Gardner, 1896), 68. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 5:170. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Ryan Furlong, Amanda J. Axley, Cristin Noonan, and Stephanie Blalock
Feb. 26.
Depress'd bad condition, how it is going to end doubtful.
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).