Faithful friend …

… ‘I Have Let Whitman Alone’. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Traubel’s devotion to Walt Whitman was complete and lifelong. Part acolyte, part sympathetic confidant, and part son, Traubel has more or less disappeared from history except for his attachment to Whitman. 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.” Eugene Debs said of Traubel that he “has the clear vision of a prophet, the analytical mind of a philosopher,…the heroic soul of a martyr, and the unpolluted heart of a child.”