I have to thank you for many mementoes in the shape of newspapers. One which lately reached me, of Dec 27 1888, contains the welcome news that you are recovering from your last severe & tedious attack of illness.
Your "November Boughs"1 has been my companion during the last week. I have read it with the deepest interest, finding the loc_vm.00332.jpg autobiographical passages regarding your early life & the development of your great scheme particularly valuable. Rejoicing also in the delightful rigour of your critical notes.
Now I am eager to get the 900 page volume of your Complete Works,2 & do not know where it is published. I shall try to obtain it through my London bookseller.
loc_vm.00333.jpgI have long wished to write about your views regarding the literature of the future. Each time I have attempted to do so, I have quailed before my own inadequacy to grapple with the theme. But I have in preparation a collection of essays on speculative & critical problems, one of which will be called "Democratic Art"3 & will be based upon your "Democratic Vistas"4 & "Leaves of Grass." This I have been working at during loc_vm.00334.jpg the last month; & however imperfect it may be, I have contrived to state in it a portion of what I think the world owes to you both for your suggestions & for the illustrations you have given in your poems—not only by asserting the necessity of a new literature adequate to the people & pregnant with the modern scientific spirit, but also by projecting & to a large extent realizing that literature in your own work.
loc_vm.00335.jpgMeanwhile I am able to echo the words of your friend Dr. Bucke5 in his "impromptu criticism,"6 & to congratulate you now in the autumn of your life upon the achievement of a monument "more enduring than brass or marble."
Believe me, dear master, to be, though a silent & uncommunicative friend, your true respectful & loving disciple
John Addington Symonds. loc_vm.00336.jpgCorrespondent:
John Addington Symonds
(1840–1893), a prominent biographer, literary critic, and poet in
Victorian England, was author of the seven-volume history Renaissance in Italy, as well as Walt
Whitman—A Study (1893), and a translator of Michelangelo's
sonnets. But in the smaller circles of the emerging upper-class English
homosexual community, he was also well known as a writer of homoerotic poetry
and a pioneer in the study of homosexuality, or sexual inversion as it was then
known. See Andrew C. Higgins, "Symonds, John Addington [1840–1893]," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).