Walt Whitman
Richard Maurice Bucke
Paperback
(Forgotten Books, Aug. 8, 2012)
Now just entering his sixty-fifth year, Walt Whitman has become the object, in America and Europe, of such pronounced attacks, defences, in quiries, and of comments, assumptions, and denials, so various and inconsistent with a certainty of steadily increasing interest, perhaps of still more pronounced attack and defencein the future that a field may well be presumed to exist for statements about him from observation at first hand. Such contemporaneous statements, executed in their own way, form the purpose of the following pages. To arrest, at the time, some otherwise evanescent facts and features of the man to sketch him on the spot, in his habit as he lived, and give a few authentic items of his ancestry, youth, middle life, and actual manners and talk, is the primary object of this volume; secondly, to put forth in regard to Leaves of Grass my own deliberate constructions of that work. I make no pretence that they are other than from a friendly point of view. As it seems to me, might doubtless have served as heading for all I have written. To balance, however, any proclivity, or danger of proclivity, in that direc tion, I have freely included in my book (A ppendix, Part II.) the fullest representation from the enemies and most outspoken fault-findings and denunciations of Leaves of Grass and their author. I know that the poet himself welcomes such searching attacks and trials. He has told me that he considers them the means whereby Nature and Fate try the right of any thing or ambi tion, book or what-not, to exist. If my light cant stand such gales, he once said to me, let it go out as it will then deserve to go out. In short, and while I have no final authority to speak for Walt Whitman (who has himself more opposed than favored my enterprise), I do not hesitate to send forth the following pages, not only as the bond fide results of my own knowledge of t(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)