DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Walt Whitman in Mickle Street" by Elizabeth Leavitt Keller. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Sadakichi Hartmann was born on the artificial island of Dejima, Nagasaki, to a Japanese mother, who died soon after childbirth, and a German father. He was raised in Germany and came to Philadelphia in 1882. Two years after arriving, at the age of seventeen, he paid his first visit to Walt Whitman, now sixty-five years old, who was living modestly just across the Delaware River, in Camden. Fascinated by the poet’s life and work, Sadakichi would visit Whitman several times over the course of six years, to talk about literature and to question the poet about contemporary authors and books. Sadakichi went on to publish Whitman’s opinions first in the New York Herald, in 1880, arousing the indignation of many and making him unpopular with the admirers of the poet, and later, in 1885, in Conversations with Walt Whitman.

This collection of essays commemorates the centennial of Walt Whitman's death and explores his contributions to the formation of the national identity of the United States.

For the Whitman bicentennial, a delightful keepsake edition of the incomparable wisdom of America's greatest poet, distilled from his fascinating late-in-life conversations with Horace Traubel. Toward the end of his life, Walt Whitman was visited almost daily at his home in Camden, New Jersey, by the young poet and social reformer Horace Traubel. After each visit, Traubel meticulously recorded their conversation, transcribing with such sensitivity that Whitman’s friend John Burroughs remarked that he felt he could almost hear the poet breathing. In Walt Whitman Speaks, acclaimed author Brenda Wineapple draws from Traubel’s extensive interviews an extraordinary gathering of Whitman’s observations that conveys the core of his ethos and vision. Here is Whitman the sage, champion of expansiveness and human freedom. Here, too, is the poet’s more personal side—his vivid memories of Thoreau, Emerson, and Lincoln, his literary judgments on writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tolstoy, and his expressions of hope in the democratic promise of the nation he loved. The result is a keepsake edition to touch the soul, capturing the distilled wisdom of America’s greatest poet.