Thank you for the kind thought which sent me the newspaper containing good news of
your health.1 It concerns me & others here very much.
A few days before the paper
came I had heard for the first time—through a friend in Italy—a report
unauthenticated that you were very seriously ill. The paragraph in the newspaper was
therefore a relief as well as a sorrow. One's feeling about such apparent evil I
find is very much controlled by the nature of the person to whom it befalls. Over
& under all feeling which the fact of your illness produces lies the one feeling
(which the growth of my own way of thinking together with your poems, & other
causes have made very real & strong)—that for some persons, & for you
among such persons, casual misfortune or calamity is not a supreme affair. We give
our grief to you with the reserve that after all Walt Whitman has not been
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really laid hold of by chance & change—that after all he eludes them &
remains altogether untouched. And if I should happen to live longer than you I believe
I should have the same conviction about what death could do to you. (Other persons
seem like pathetic little flowers who have no title to permanance of being—but
such an aristocratic theory of the ownership of a future life ought rather to be
addressed to Goethe,2 than to you, whose faith is larger & more
charitable)—
The best piece of the news about you is that you are likely to be strong again, &
to continue your work. I trust that may be so, & rely
a good deal on your previous health & vigour,
& on the fact that you are
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not of an age which ought to discourage hope of full recovery. We had been looking
forward with very strong satisfaction towards seeing you over among us this year.
That I suppose cannot now be expected: but it may come to be a fact at some later
time. One thing I will ask—that occasionally some friend, if not yourself, would
let me hear of your health—a line of writing would be enough. I think Mr. Burroughs3
would be willing to take the trouble; (& he would add to my gain if he would mention
to me the name of anything you may have published since "Democratic Vistas."4 I think I
saw some small collection of poems mentioned as having appeared at New York).
My wife joins with mine her love & both go to you together. We are well. I have
taken to an attempt at the making of poems since twelve months. It has always seemed
to me more my proper work than prose, but if a sufficient experiment proves the
reverse I shall return in a business-like fashion to prose—I mean to go on
quietly, & not print any poems for three or four years at soonest. I have just
written an article on Victor Hugo's poetry;5 &, when it is
printed, I will send it to you. There is much in common between Victor Hugo & you,
but if I had to choose between "Leaves of Grass" & "La Légende des Siècles,"6
I should have not a moment's hesitation in throwing away "La Légende." There
is a certain air of self-conscious beauty or sublimity in the attitude which Victor Hugo's
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soul assumes, that greatly impairs their effect with me. The poems, or many of them,
are not thoroughly simple—there is something manufactured in them—they do
not adhere & cling quite close, & become an invisible part of the reader. (But
I must stop this).
I think within twelve months of publishing a volume of essays, & intend to include the Westminster one on your poems—(I shall remove from it one or two expressions which may have done you wrong with some readers, & which on that account I regret). It happens that several of the essays will be concerned with democratic or republican leaders—V. Hugo—Edgar Quinet7—Lamennais8—Landor9—Milton10—Whitman,
Please before very long, if it is convenient, let me somehow hear of your health.
And dear friend believe me Always affectionately yours, Edward Dowden.Correspondent:
Edward Dowden (1843–1913), professor of
English literature at the University of Dublin, was one of the first to
critically appreciate Whitman's poetry, particularly abroad, and was primarily
responsible for Whitman's popularity among students in Dublin. In July 1871,
Dowden penned a glowing review of Whitman's work in the Westminster Review entitled "The Poetry of Democracy: Walt Whitman," in which Dowden described
Whitman as "a man unlike any of his predecessors. . . . Bard of America, and
Bard of democracy." In 1888, Whitman observed to Traubel: "Dowden is a book-man:
but he is also and more particularly a man-man: I guess that is where we
connect" (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden,
Sunday, June 10, 1888, 299). For more, see Philip W. Leon, "Dowden, Edward (1843–1913)," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).