Paper rec'd. with its saddening news of yr increased weakness. I am whirled on in such a melee of work (exhausting driving work) that I have no time to write or say anything agreeable I fear. I look back with feeling of pleasure of the deepest nature to those divine days I spent in companionship of the noblest of books L. of G. & those happy letters back & forth between you & me.
Recently someone in Transcript2 noticed that
jackass Bartlett in his "Familiar Quotations" had not a line of Walt W. I went
over yr books espec. Song of Myself & culled a list of phrases & lines
that I offered to prove
the classic & current coin
already.
However, Clement still holds it
in reserve. Will let you know when it appears. wh. may be in a year. After all that your
sublime & haughty songs are not lozenge poetry
loc.03168.003_large.jpg
for silly boys & girls is something to be proud of. It is a book
separate
"the words of my book nothing, the [trend] of it everything3
Sadikichi4 seems to be in St. Louis.—writing.
O'Connor's5 book is out I see.—"Brazen Android"6
Write dear Walt as of old when spirit moves you & so will I.
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).