The "Personal," which appeared on July 19 (p. 4, col. 5), is
another unnoted Whitman item:
The burial of little Walter Whitman, an infant year-old nephew
of the poet, occurred a day or two since at Camden, N. J. It was
very simple, without sermon or ceremony. In the middle of the room,
in its white coffin, lay the dead babe, strewed with a profusion of
fresh geranium leaves and some tuberoses. All the young ones of the
neighborhood, by groups or couples or singly, kept coming
noiselessly in, surrounding the coffin. Near the corpse, in a great
chair, sat Walt Whitman, enveloped by children, holding one
encircled by either arm, and a beautiful little girl on his lap.
The little one looked curiously at the spectacle of death and then
inquiringly in the old man's face. "You don't know what it is, do
you, my dear?" said he, adding,
"We don't either." Many of the children surrounding the coffin were
mere babes, and had to be lifted up to take a look.
The willingness of the
Tribune to print this flattering
account of the poet—by the poet—is a tribute to its sense of
fairness. For earlier in this year Robert Buchanan, the English
poet and admirer of Whitman, created a veritable international
incident in which this newspaper vehemently took sides—against
Whitman.
[8]
On March 28, the London correspondent of the
Tribune,
in
a first-page article on "Anglo-American Topics," devoted two
lengthy paragraphs to Buchanan's impassioned, but not very
accurate, assertion, in the London Daily News of March 13,
that Whitman was impoverished by the refusal of American editors to
accept his poetry. The skepticism of the reporter—"Save me from
my friends—or from one of them—must be Mr. Walt
Whitman's cry
when he gets this week's mails from London"—is also apparent in
a long editorial in the same issue of the newspaper, "In Re Walt
Whitman." On March 30 an editorial note again assails Buchanan for
the recklessness of his charges and maintains, somewhat
gratuitously, that Whitman's position in the Attorney General's
Office "supported a family of four persons, before he received it;
he held the place several years, and if he failed to accumulate any
surplus during that time, the cause thereof was certainly not
'persecution.'"[9] Another hostile editorial
appeared on April 12, "American vs. English Criticism," in
which the author evaluates Whitman's poetry and, while
acknowledging the power of his verse, laments the absence of
discipline and restraint.
Whitman's American friends soon rushed to his defense. On April
13, the Tribune printed a letter from John Burroughs, "Walt
Whitman's Poetry" (p. 6, col. 1),[10]
although the newspaper evidently withheld this letter, dated March
30,
until after the appearance of the third editorial on the preceding
day. Then a letter from William D. O'Connor, one of Whitman's most
fervid admirers, was printed on April 22, "Walt Whitman. Is He
Persecuted?" (p. 8, cols. 1-3). In answer to this extravagant, and
garrulous, encomium appeared an editorial, on the same day,
entitled "Intellectual Convexity." In May the
Tribune
returned to its former policy of treating Whitman objectively.
Perhaps Whitelaw Reid himself restored the balance after Bayard
Taylor,
[11] evidently the author of
the editorials referred to above, had run roughshod over the poet.
At any rate, after the storm caused by Buchanan, the newspaper
continued to reprint Whitman's contributions and to give him good
publicity, as evidenced in the letter of July 18 reproduced
above.
[12]
The next letter, although undated, can be assigned to 1878
through the reference to "A Poet's Recreation," a "gossipy" letter
printed in the Tribune on July 4, 1878 (p. 2, cols.
1-2).[13]
