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Walt Whitman to William Sloane Kennedy, 24 May 1885

[Poet as a Craftsman]  rut.00005.001_large.jpg Dear friend

The long MS you sent me some months since is all right & I will return it to you forthwith—The whole drift of it is lofty, subtle & true—I would not put it out by itself—Such things never strike in so well in the abstract as in illustration, of some definite personal, critical concrete thing.—I suggest to you a criticism on Tennyson and Walt Whitman (or if you prefer on Victor Hugo, T and WW) where they should be work'd in—What think you?1

W W  rut.00005.002_large.jpg

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).


Notes

  • 1. On January 16 Kennedy sent the manuscript of "The New Ars Poetica," in which he attempted to defend Whitman's poetic style. On June 2 he accepted Whitman's suggestion of expanding his article. This essay became part of The Poet as A Craftsman (see the letter from Whitman to Kennedy of December 2, 1885). [back]
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