Y'r card rec'd2—thanks—fine sunny day & clear evn'g, after snow-storm &c—I have the grip at last & quite badly—am sitting here alone in my den—nothing very new—my eyes failing—Expect to give (& wish to) my "Death of Abraham Lincoln" memorandum April 15 in Phila:3—shall have a little poemet in May Century4—Did I tell you to look at (London) Universal Review Feb. 15 for piece ab't me by Sarrazin?5 Love to Mrs K—
W WCorrespondent:
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).