“I have let Whitman alone”

Whitman had first encountered Traubel about fifteen years earlier, shortly after the poet arrived in Camden in 1873. Traubel’s great achievement lay in these transcriptions; the first volume, With Walt Whitman in Camden, was published in 1906 as a kind of daily diary of Whitman’s talk. And yet by the time of his death in 1919—the centenary of Whitman’s birth—many of Traubel’s own writings had been translated into German, French, and Japanese; he was known in America and abroad as a committed socialist and humanitarian, and what Helen Keller called a champion “of liberty, of manhood and womanhood, of justice and righteousness.”

Source: www.nybooks.com