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Walt Whitman.
The October 13, 1888, issue of The Critic (vol. 13) had published Edmund Gosse's provocative essay "Has America Produced a Poet?" Among those who responded in the November 24 number were John Greenleaf Whittier, John Burroughs, Julian Hawthorne, Julia Ward Howe, Charles Dudley Warner, and Walt Whitman, whom Gosse had met three years earlier, in 1885. (Gay Wilson Allen, who described the meeting in The Solitary Singer [1960; pp. 520-522], evidently did not know of Whitman's letter in response to the essay.) Whitman's letter (p. 521) was prefaced by editorial comment:
Walt Whitman's views are, naturally, more radical than those of any
other contributor to the discussion:
Briefly to answer impromptu your request of Oct: 19—to
answer
the question whether I think any American poet not now living deserves a
place among the thirteen "English inheritors of unassailed renown"
(Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Burns,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats,)—and which
American poets would be truly worthy, &c. Though to me the
deep of the matter goes down, down beneath. I remember the
London Times at the time, in opportune, profound and
friendly
articles on Bryant's and Longfellow's deaths, spoke of the embarrassment,
warping effect, and confusion on America (her poets and poetic students)
"coming in possession of a great estate they had never lifted a hand to form
or earn"; and the further contingency of "the English language ever having
annexed to it a lot of first-class Poetry that would be American, not
European"—proving then something precious over all, and beyond
valuation. But perhaps that is
venturing outside the question. Of the thirteen British immortals
mentioned—after placing Shakspere on a sort of preëminence
of
fame not to be invaded yet—the names of Bryant, Emerson, Whittier
and
Longfellow (with even added names, sometimes Southerners, sometimes
Western or other writers of only one or two pieces,) deserve in my opinion
an equally high niche of renown as belongs to any on the baker's dozen of
that glorious list.
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