March 10, '87.
Yours came this morning with extract from Buchanan's1 book.2 Thank you truly, such things are more help to me than you think. . . . Have just
sent off two sets of 1876 ed'n to John Hay,3 of Washington, at his request.4
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).
Notes
- 1. Robert Buchanan (1841–1901), Scottish poet and
critic, had lauded Whitman in the Broadway Annual in
1867, and in 1872 praised Whitman but attributed his poor reception in England
to the sponsorship of William Michael Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
See Harold Blodgett, Walt Whitman in England (1934),
79–80, and Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer
(1955), 445–446. Swinburne's recantation later in 1872 may be partly
attributable to Buchanan's injudicious remarks. For more on Buchanan, see Philip
W. Leon, "Buchanan, Robert (1841–1901)," Walt Whitman:
An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 2. Buchanan's A Look Round Literature (1887) contains a chapter on Walt
Whitman entitled "The American Socrates," in which he describes Whitman as "the
wisest and noblest, the most truly great, of all modern literary men" (345).
Buchanan goes on to write, "We have a beautiful singer in Tennyson, and some day
it will be among Tennyson's highest honours that he was once named kindly and
appreciatively by Whitman" (346). [back]
- 3. John Hay (1838–1905) was
Abraham Lincoln's private secretary and a historian as well as Secretary of
State under Theodore Roosevelt. Hay praised Whitman's "A Death-Sonnet for
Custer" (later entitled "From Far Dakota's Cañons") when it appeared in the
New York Daily Tribune on July 10, 1876. Whitman sent the
1876 Centennial Edition of Leaves of Grass to Hay on
August 1, 1876 (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of
the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C.). [back]
- 4. Hay acknowledged receipt
of the books on March 12, 1887 and sent the poet
$30 as thanks for a copy of "O Captain! My Captain!" that Whitman copied by
hand and sent along with the books to the historian. [back]