ABSTRACT
Extracts from an article by T. W. Rolleston, translated from the German by Alfred Forman and Richard Maurice Bucke, in In Re, pp. 285–95.
Thomas W. Rolleston (1857–1920) was a critic, editor, translator and correspondent with Whitman. His exchange of letters with the poet appears in the volume Whitman and Rolleston: A Correspondence edited by Herst Frenz (Dublin, 1952). Professor Harold Blodgett (Walt Whitman in England) informs us that he was an associate of Standish O’Grady (also an admirer of Whitman) in the Irish literary revival. He
was a scholar who brought to Whitman the scholar’s talent for studious exposition and translation. Rolleston discovered Whitman in 1877, when he contributed a youthful poem on Walt to Kotabos, a brilliant Trinity College publication founded by Tyrrell. Two years later Rolleston went to Germany, and at the end of a four years’ absorption in German literature and philosophy he published at Dresden, jointly with H. B. Cotterill, a pamphlet entitled Uber Wordsworth und Walt Whitman: Zwei Vortrage Gehalten vor dem Literarischen Verein zu Dresden … Rolleston’s part in this enterprise was a twenty-two page discussion of Whitman and a translation of the ‘Song of the Answerer.’
