Camden
Feb: 26 '891
Fine sunshiny cold day—Dr Bucke2 is here, got in to-day all right—crowded with the
meter company & capital & manufactoring matter3—wants to come over to W[ashington] &
see you, & probably will—but no day yet fixed—Rather miserable with me,
constipation, cold in the head & now a bad spleen trouble (enlargement &c)—Have
rec'd the German trans: L of G. (200 pp)4— Shall I send you one?
Walt Whitman
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. This letter is addressed:
Wm D O'Connor | 1015 O Street N W | Washington D C. It is postmarked: Camden,
N.J. | Feb 26 | 8 PM | 89; Washington, Rec'd | Feb 27 | 7 AM | 89 | 7. [back]
- 2. 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]
- 3. Bucke and his brother-in-law
William John Gurd were designing a gas and fluid meter to be patented in Canada
and sold in England. [back]
- 4. Whitman is referring to Thomas W.
H. Rolleston's selected translation, which was the first book-length translation
from Whitman to be published in Germany, and which was revised by Dr. Karl
Knortz and published as Grashalme: Gedichte (Zurich:
Verlags-Magazin, 1889). For more on this, see Whitman and
Rolleston: A Correspondence, ed. Horst Frenz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1951), and Walter Grünzweig and Vanessa Steinroetter, "'Leaving it to you to prove and define': 'Poets to Come' and Whitman's
German Translators." [back]