Walt Whitman: A Study [William F. Gable's copy] [WITH] manuscript fragment in Whitman's hand

SYMONDS, John Addington

Edité par John C. Nimmo, London, 1893

A propos de cet article

Tall octavo, 160pp., illustrated with a frontispiece portrait of Whitman and four other plates. A good copy in the publisher's blue cloth with navy cloth spine and applied paper label. Notable wear to the corners and to the spine label, but an otherwise clean, fresh copy internally. Noted Whitman collector William F. Gable's copy, with his handsome bookplate to the front paste-down, and another handsome bookplate to the opposite endleaf. Laid in is a magnificent manuscript fragment in Whitman's hand, in pencil, quoting Charles Baudelaire. The note in very good condition, with numerous old tiny pin-prick gouges, not atall affecting the legibility or integrity of the document. Small chip to one side, not affecting any text. Two inked bookseller's descriptions, both certainly pre-WWII, are present and laid-in. The fragment reads, in full: "Says Charles Baudelaire 'The immoderate taste for beauty + art leads men into monstrous excesses. In minds imbued with a frantic greed for the beautiful all the balances of truth + justice disappear. There is a lust, a disease of the art faculties which eats up the moral like a cancer.'" Below the text, in ink, is a brief and very helpful note which reads: "a piece of Walt Whitman's scribble for Gable 1912 - Traubel." Horace Traubel, a poet and contemporary of Whitman's, befriended him early in his career, supporting him after the negative criticism he received for "Leaves of Grass." He became a lifelong friend, and was quite famously Whitman's literary executor, a role which would have permited him to produce this fragment for Gable. The quotation from Baudelaire is extremely relevant and interesting when seen through Whitman's own lens. While Whitman's poetry was heartfelt, personal, and romantic in many ways, it was always intensely political and informed by Whitman's moral outlook. He must have felt a great kinship with Baudelaire upon reading this passage from the French poet, especially as both were swimming against the Victorian current so steeped in sentimentality. An article by W. T. Bandy in "Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (V. 1, No. 3, 1983) entitled "Whitman and Baudelaire," notes: "Baudelaire's name occurs once, and only once, in Whitman's writings, in the essay on "The Poetry of the Future," first printed in the North American Review for February, 1881." Bandy goes on to reproduce this exact quotation, which helps us to determine that this manuscript fragment, possibly clipped by Traubel himself, was from his draft (perhaps the only one) of that article of Whitman's in The North American Review. Bandy's articles goes on to investigate various theories of how Whitman would have come to know Baudelaire's work, though he concludes (without providing much evidence) that the poets were quite different in their work, and that Baudelaire "would [not] have cared for the man or his poetry." Whatever conclusions about their relationship that one chooses to make, this is nevertheless a uniquely interesting (and frame-able!) manuscript fragment, with stellar provenance, which brings together two singular greats of 19th century poetry; each of them in different ways an early figure of literary modernism.

N° de réf. du vendeur 13632

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Walt Whitman: A Study [William F. Gable's copy] [WITH] manuscript fragment in Whitman's hand
• Éditeur: John C. Nimmo, London
• Date de parution: 1893
• Édition: Limited Edition.
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Poetry