Walt Whitman's baseball quote (surely not 1846!)

[George Thompson]

The July 23, 1846 passage from the Brooklyn Eagle is reprinted as Whitman's in vol. 1, of the collecton of his journalism in the Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, Peter Lang, 1998, p. 477.  The editor of this collection supposes that all editorial matter in the Eagle is by Whitman if it is not otherwise attributed there.
I haven't been able to locate the other passage in Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden.  Traubel's notes on his conversations with Whitman were published in 9 volumes over a 90 (!) year period, and Bobst doesn't have a complete set.  Gary Smigdall, in Intimate with Walt, [selections from Traubel's notes], has a different but similar passage from a conversation of early April, 1889, reading in part, "it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere"  This is on p. 261 of Smigdall's book, and from vol. 4, p. 508 of Traubel's volumes.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.

----- Original Message -----
From: Bapopik at AOL.COM
Date: Sunday, July 11, 2004 2:44 pm
Subject: Re: Walt Whitman's baseball quote (surely not 1846!)

> BASEBALL'S GREATEST QUOTATIONS
> by Paul Dickson
> 1991
>
> Pg. 468:
> WHITMAN, WALT
> "I see great things in baseball.  It's our game--the American
> game.  It will
> take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a
> larger physical stoicism.  Tend to relieve us from being a nervous.
> dyspeptic set.  Repair
> these losses, and be a blessing to us."
> --Unearthed by Douglass Wallop, the quote appears in his
> _Baseball: An
> Informal History_
>
> "In our sun-down perambulations, of late, through the outer parts of
> Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing
> 'base,' a certain
> game of ball."
> --_Brooklyn Eagle_, July 1846
> (Walt Whitman didn't write EVERYTHING in the newspaper--ed.)