Pretty bad gastric, bladder & catarrhal times continued but might be worse—bowel movement to day, first in a week—Sit up most of the time—one third of the time deathly weak, cannot rise—Splendid short autograph word f'm Tennyson1 anent of birthday2—have sent "Good-Bye"3 to Garland4—(he sent $5. I sent two)—the preparatory all-enclosing continual theory of L of G. is myself, opening myself first to the countless techniques, traditions, samples, items, knowledges, &c: &c: &c: as a fund & interior battery, magazine & identity:sphere, nothing too small to be despised, all welcom'd, to be digested & formulated by my own living personal emotionality, wh' shapes & stamps the L[eaves] birth marks f'm first to last, more than any book known—(it is the volume of human Personality down below every thing else)—The screws have been turn'd down on the clef of "Good-Bye," to keep things low, yet garrulous, perhaps sometimes irascible (Lear like) but quite a different atmosphere f'm the preceding (while the same subject continued)—I have been a little afraid of monotony, but the trend of the invisible wind is mainly the same—all this—Keep all this for your own uses—
W WCorrespondent:
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).