What does this mean—this solemn cemetery business? And yet it is well. It has a solemn-tragic, solid magnificent resoluteness—a kind of secular range of vision—one might expect fr. Walt Whitman. Down then, climbing sorrow! & let us have it over with. & pass on to hope that the burial business wont be mentioned again for many years. Dont get down-hearted, my boy, say I! We read yr strong verse in November Century.1 Mrs K2 & I think yr poems in old age are just as fine as any of the others—softly suffused with an after-glow flush—dream-like & pensive. I'm afraid a kind of grip has got hold of you this weather! Merry Xmas, dear Walt!
Your toiling friend, W. S. Kennedy.Am reading the Century Life of Lincoln in back numbers.3
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).