Debating Manliness: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Sloane Kennedy, and the Question of Whitman

In 1908 William Sloane Kennedy, one of Walt Whitman’s close allies in his final years, wrote a barbed essay entitled “Euphrasy and Rue for T. W. Higginson,” heretofore unpublished.¹ Intriguingly, Kennedy noted at the top of the first manuscript leaf: “N.B. not written for publication during the present generation . . . or the next—.” This restriction on publication allowed for outspoken criticism of Whitman’s antagonist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a longtime acquaintance of Kennedy himself.² Surprisingly, the restriction also emboldened Kennedy to attack Whitman’s “dearest friends”—William Douglas O’Connor and Horace Traubel—as actually the poet’s “greatest enemies.”³ “Euphrasy and Rue” (Kennedy’s title quotes Paradise Lost to suggest a failure of vision) would deserve publication if it were only a lively and insightful document shedding light on Whitman’s reputation.⁴ But this essay has further value because it illuminates in stark fashion the politics of late-nineteenth-century literary criticism: in this case, how literary judgments intervened in and were influenced by contested discursive constructions of gender identity, sexual predilections, and class status.

Kennedy, a minister’s son from Oxford, Ohio (1850–1929), graduated from Yale University in 1875 and attended Harvard Divinity School, leaving without taking a degree. In 1879 he joined the staff of the Philadelphia American and began a career as a journalist and literary figure; in the 1880s he worked for the Boston Evening Transcript. During his Boston years, he developed a friendship with Whitman that led to many visits and an extended correspondence. He became a prolific writer, publishing biographies of Longfellow and Whittier, studies of Ruskin and John Burroughs, a small anthology of his own poetry entitled Breezes from the Field (1886), and a collection of nature essays, In Portia’s Gardens (1897). His most important contributions, however, were his studies of Whitman, including Reminiscences of Walt Whitman (1896), an edition of Walt Whitman’s Diary in Canada (1904), and The Fight of a Book for the World (1926).

A devotee of Whitman, Kennedy observed in The Real John Burroughs (1924): “Burroughs loved Walt like a woman; but so did I.”⁵ This richly ambiguous remark (did they love Whitman because he was like a woman, or did they love Whitman as a woman might love him?) hints at a little-studied erotics of discipleship and invites further analysis of the rivalries and jealousies among Whitman’s friends.⁶ Attacks on Whitman provoked divisions within the group of “hot little prophets,” who differed—sometimes viciously—on how best to defend the poet.

Higginson’s Critiques of Whitman

Higginson wrote a series of pieces from 1881 to 1898 belittling Whitman, all of which lie behind Kennedy’s “Euphrasy and Rue.” Higginson disliked Leaves of Grass and loathed Whitman himself. He summarized his objections in a letter to Kennedy of 7 March 1895, offering five reasons why Whitman “never seemed to me a thoroughly wholesome or manly man”:

(1) [Whitman’s] “priapism” (2) the entire absence in his poetry of any personal love for any individual woman, its place being filled by the mere craving of sex for sex (3) his want of personal honesty in business matters—as shown in the anecdote told of him by J. H. Ward in his paper on Parton in the N.E. [New England] Magazine—a fact told me by Parton himself, one of the most truthful men I ever knew (4) his not going into the army when we all looked to him as precisely the man to organize a regiment on Broadway but selecting the minor & safe function of a nurse (5) his intense personal egotism, as shown by his building a costly tomb at a time when he was supposed to be a poor man & people were being asked to aid & support him.⁷

Higginson’s only personal encounter with...