On this day in 1871 Walt Whitman wrote to the British essayist, Mrs. Anne Gilchrist to delicately decline her offer of marriage. Gilchrist was a forty-three-year-old widow, one who knew Tennyson and Carlyle, and knew enough about literature to have completed her husband's biography of William Blake. In "An Englishwoman's Defense of Walt Whitman" she had championed the poet as "one that is free of the universe, and can tell its secrets as none before." Conventional poetry (and the moralizing critics) might better stand aside, for "there is something come into the world nobler, diviner than herself" and though we might criticize a palace or cathedral, "what is the good of criticizing a forest?" ... FULL STORY »
