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Originally published in 1939
Some of this information may no longer be current and in that case is presented for historical interest only.
Edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2002
Through the accident of illness, a little house on Mickle Street in Camden became one of those literary havens that recompense aging poets for
their early struggles. Walt Whitman (1819-92), after ten years in Washington as a newspaper correspondent, a war hospital nurse, and a Government clerk, in 1873 suffered a paralytic stroke and retired to Camden,
where his brother lived. He spent eleven years in his brother's house in
Stevens Street, and the last eight years of his life in his own home at No.
330 Mickle Street.
During much of this time he was able to get about, going down to
Timber Creek, a stream some ten miles below Camden, and enjoying walks
and talks with intimates. Whitman's Camden period was not, however,
merely the passive twilight of a creative life. Here he wrote some of his
best prose in Specimen Days and Collect (1882-83), and prepared five
new editions of Leaves of Grass (1876-92) to three of which were added
new groups of poems -- Two Rivulets (7876), November Boughs (1888),
and Goodbye, My Fancy (1891). Artists, writers, and others who had felt
the refreshing catharsis of Whitman's work frequented the house in Mickle
Street; he was hailed by the literary elect of many foreign countries. Possibly no literary man ever lived to see a greater transformation of opinion
regarding his own writings.
The Camden days marked the turning point of Whitman's career in two
other respects. Now, for the first time, his writings earned him a measure
of freedom from financial worries. An article, too, published in the West
Jersey Press in 1876 which described him as "poor . . . old . . . and
paralyzed" brought a prompt influx of gifts and money from friends and
sympathizers all over the world. Both the reading public and the critics
began to see fundamental decency in Whitman's honest naturalism. A last
attempt in 1882 by sanctimonious editors to bowdlerize Leaves of Grass
aroused a courageous and successful defense of the poet by many leading
critics and editors. The "deathbed edition" of Leaves of Grass closed
Whitman's Camden period.
Whitman's years in Camden became the theme of a vast body of writing, including Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890-1891, by J. Johnson and
J. W. Wallace, Walt Whitman in Mickle Street, by Elizabeth Leavitt
Keller and With Walt Whitman in Camden, by Horace Traubel. Traubel's work is one of the most scrupulous and most minute records of an
author in action since Boswell's Johnson. He (1858-1919) was a native
of Camden, editor of a journal of liberal opinion, The Conservator, which
he founded in 1890 in Philadelphia.
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