ABSTRACT
Extracts from The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication (dated 2 September 1865; published 1866), pp. 3–12, 44–6.
William Douglas O’Connor, an ardent abolitionist author whom Whitman had first met in Boston, was employed in Washington as a clerk in the Treasury Department during the Civil War. He was, as Allen’s biography of Whitman indicates, very helpful in getting Whitman a clerkship in the Interior Department at $1,200 a year. It was from this job that Whitman was dismissed by Secretary Harlan, as told in O’Connor’s pamphlet. It may be remarked parenthetically that no great financial harm to Whitman ensued, since he was merely transferred to the Department of Justice, where O’Connor’s friend, who had got the job for Whitman originally worked. The dismissal, in fact, worked out to Whitman’s benefit by inspiring O’Connor’s irate pamphlet. Its title, suggested by a line in Tennyson, soon became synonymous with Whitman’s name, and he is still occasionally referred to, even in our own day, as ‘the good gray poet’.
William Sloane Kennedy in The Fight of a Book for the World (1926) writes of O’Connor’s work that it is ‘full of hyperbole, to be sure, but also of the flaming lava of invective and of ripest culture… . Wendell Philips spoke of it as “the most brilliant piece of controversial literature issued during the nineteenth century.” Even the hostile Richard H. Stoddard called it “one of the most extraordinary things we ever encountered”.’ A few years later, O’Connor published a war story The Carpenter in which the hero, under a thin disguise, is an idealized version of Walt Whitman. In The Good Gray Poet, his plan is to meet an ad hominem attack with an ad hominem defence. Its idea is Whitman’s that in some mystic and ultimate sense, the poem and the poet are one; he who touched his book touched a man as well. 116O’Connor’s effusion is not in any sense comparable in literary worth to Emerson’s famous letter of a decade before but, by making Whitman into a literary martyr, the document played a vital role in the history of the widespread public recognition of the validity of claims made on his behalf as a poet.
