Richard Maurice Bucke to Walt Whitman, 8 June 1891
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Medical Superintendent's
Office.
INSANE ASYLUM
LONDON ONTARIO1
8 May2 1891
H.3 & I have been rather in a pucker about you untill this morning's mail brought y'r letters of 4th & 5th4 and some bundles of papers to H.5 We are much relieved now to find that you are certainly no worse and may be a little easier. We had a long and most charming drive through the country yesterday—H., Anne,6 P.E. Bucke,7 and a couple of girls8—today the weather is again perfect—H. will tell you about it, he thinks is worth annexing f'm what he has seen of it so far. We are very busy talking and planning—I guess the W.W. business9 will be all settled by the end of this week when H. leaves! My oldest boy, Maurice10 is appointed on the Geological Survey at $60.00, and found—pretty good, eh? Nothing new abt. going to England.11 The meter12 goes on all right.
R M Bucke
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Correspondent:
Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) was a
Canadian physician and psychiatrist who grew close to Whitman after reading Leaves of Grass in 1867 (and later memorizing it) and
meeting the poet in Camden a decade later. Even before meeting Whitman, Bucke
claimed in 1872 that a reading of Leaves of Grass led him
to experience "cosmic consciousness" and an overwhelming sense of epiphany.
Bucke became the poet's first biographer with Walt
Whitman (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1883), and he later served as one
of his medical advisors and literary executors. For more on the relationship of
Bucke and Whitman, see Howard Nelson, "Bucke, Richard Maurice," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes
- 1. This letter is addressed: Walt Whitman | 328 Mickle Street | Camden | New Jersey | U.S.A. It is postmarked: LONDON | PM | JU8 | 91 | CANADA; CAMDEN, N.J. | JUN | 10 | 6AM | 1891 | REC'D. [back]
- 2. This letter was misdated as "8 May 1891." The correct date is "8 June 1891." [back]
- 3. Horace L. Traubel (1858–1919) was an American essayist, poet, and magazine publisher. He is best remembered as the literary executor, biographer, and self-fashioned "spirit child" of Walt Whitman. During the late 1880s and until Whitman's death in 1892, Traubel visited the poet virtually every day and took thorough notes of their conversations, which he later transcribed and published in three large volumes entitled With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906, 1908, & 1914). After his death, Traubel left behind enough manuscripts for six more volumes of the series, the final two of which were published in 1996. For more on Traubel, see Ed Folsom, "Traubel, Horace L. [1858–1919]," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 4. See Whitman's letters to Bucke of June 4, 1891 and June 5, 1891. [back]
- 5. Horace Traubel married Anne Montgomerie on May 28, 1891 (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). After Whitman's birthday celebration on May 31, the couple went to Canada with Richard Maurice Bucke, physician at the Insane Asylum in London, Ontario, and returned to Camden on June 14, 1891. [back]
- 6. Anne Montgomerie (1864–1954) married Horace Traubel in Whitman's Mickle Street house in Camden, New Jersey, in 1891. They had one daughter, Gertrude (1892–1983), and one son, Wallace (1893–1898). Anne was unimpressed with Whitman's work when she first read it, but later became enraptured by what she called its "pulsating, illumined life," and she joined Horace as associate editor of his Whitman-inspired periodical The Conservator. Anne edited a small collection of Whitman's writings, A Little Book of Nature Thoughts (Portland, Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1896). After Horace's death, both Anne and Gertrude edited his manuscripts of his conversations with Whitman during the final four years of the poet's life, which eventually became the nine-volume With Walt Whitman in Camden. [back]
- 7. P. E. (Percy) Bucke was one of Richard Maurice Bucke's brothers. P. E. Bucke had married Sarah Sidney Rothwell Bucke in January 1857. [back]
- 8. As yet we have no information about these people. [back]
- 9. Horace Traubel and Bucke were beginning to make plans for a collected volume of writings by and about Whitman. Bucke, Traubel, and Thomas Harned—Whitman's three literary executors—edited In Re Walt Whitman (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1893), which included the three unsigned reviews of the first edition of Leaves of Grass that were written by Whitman himself, William Sloane Kennedy's article, "Dutch Traits of Walt Whitman," and Robert Ingersoll's lecture Liberty in Literature (delivered in honor of Whitman at Philadelphia's Horticultural Hall on October 21, 1890), as well as writings by the naturalist John Burroughs and by James W. Wallace, a co-founder of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship in Bolton, England. [back]
- 10. Maurice Andrews Bucke (1868–1899) was the oldest son of Richard Maurice Bucke and his wife Jessie Gurd Bucke. Maurice, named after his father, died in Montana in a carriage accident when he was thirty-one years old. [back]
- 11. As Bucke's letters in May and June 1891 both to Whitman and Horace Traubel make clear, he was going abroad to establish a foreign market for his gas and fluid meter, a subject to which he referred constantly in his communications but which the poet studiously ignored. [back]
- 12. Bucke and his brother-in-law William John Gurd were designing a gas and fluid meter to be patented in Canada and sold in England. [back]