How is the healthy invalid to-day? I rcd mag. of poetry (& re-mailed) & the Chicago paper. Good "ads" for you they ought to be. How hard it is to live down a pre-conceived wrong impression! These very numerous articles ought to sell any man's books rapidly.
I have just spent an hour or so writing to publishers Gardner1 & Wilson.2 Have expressed the MS. to Gardner, after waiting six weeks in vain on Wilson.3 I dislike him & his ways much. But I tell him it is still not too late if he will say the word. He acts like an imbecile—to me.
W S.K.New4 Electric lamps in Belmont. Beautiful! I have just been out to see the brilliant star-show; noticed the big cherry tree in the lane splashed all over one side with white, & found it was one of the Electric lamps a full quarter of a mile away (on a rise of ground) that caused it. These new lights poetize the night wonderfully don't they?
loc.02991.002_large.jpg loc.02991.002_zas_large.jpgCorrespondent:
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).