Let me thank you now, lest I forget it, for your kind thoughtfulness in offering to remember me with a copy of the new flexible pocket Ed.n of L. of G.2 It is what I have long wished for. I think the value of a book of poems is many times multiplied by being in pocket form. I recently b't (35 cts) a copy of Rhys's3 Ed.n. They had no business to sell it. It came over in an invoice of Camelot Classics. There are no more to be had here. But it is only a fragment—mutilated, & has mistakes in it. I bt it to lend to Whitman beginners & weaklings. Have loaned it now to Dr. Clarence J. Blake,4 the finest aurist in Boston.
When will the little vol. be out? My yard is looking finely. 2 doz. hyacinths out.
bye bye W. S. K.The squirrel is eating his nut on the hickory limb while the cat half-asleep in the house-gutter on the roof eyes him askance with one eye.
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).