I return the J. Burroughs1 Book. & the pamphlet with thanks. The Burroughs book fed me on my journey home, so that I had to buy no other reading.
I shall cherish the memory of that blessed January 2nd '85 to the end of my days.
My dear Whitman, I want you to regard me as a sort of son; tell me whenever I can do anything for you; let me loan you 5.00 if you get in a pinch, (& I have it). It is not always easy to borrow on real estate you know, or convenient I mean. & behave handsomely, & intimately & affectionately toward me.
I am going to enclose a $1.00 between fly-leaves of the Burroughs' book as half pay
for a copy of the new edition of yr poems when it comes out. If it shd never come
out, all right. I owe you $10. more anyway; for I loc.02599.002_large.jpg got you to make me a present
of yr books under false pretenses. I have not lectured on you more than once, & shall
feel that I am a fraud until I have sent you $10. Say not a word.
I know you are rich: all poets are. But I want you to have luxuries, now you are getting old.
If this humbug government were worth a copper spangle it wd have settled a handsome pension on you—an honorary life salary—as a recognition of your unparalleled services during the war. But it wd probably be odious to you to even have the subject whispered of ? ?
I found brave little wife well, & got a hearty welcome. Our pretty & remarkably smart cat died the day I returned—whereat tears & swelling breasts, & a private funeral.
I must send you my N. Orleans articles. My Creole article in Lit. Wld. is paid for, but not out for 3 weeks.
As is my paper entitled
"The New Ars Poetica"2
if you can get a certain number of copies disposed of in advance, enough to cover expense (say $25 (?)) it wd be the means of my being able to publish it. Dr. Bucke will take a certain number, & I shall sell a few I suppose. Wd 20 cts be too high a price for it?
Let me know what success you have in the matter. But dont go to any trouble.
Aff W. S. Kennedy overIt strikes me that it wd be better to write that essay or preface, & let it be published among yr collected prose works say after yr death—rather than put it before the poems themselves. I too have "qualms" about this latter. Yr new poems will give value enough to the new edition.
I believe you will stand stronger, Walt, if you stick to yr old way of not explaining unless in a prose essay in a separate volume, as I said.
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).