Describes the relations between Grace Ellery Channing, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Douglas O\u27Conner, and Walt Whitman, focusing especially upon the never-realized proposal to make a calendar using excerpts from Leaves of Grass

Krieg, Joann

English

Describes the relations between Grace Ellery Channing, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Douglas O'Conner, and Walt Whitman, focusing especially upon the never-realized proposal to make a calendar using excerpts from Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Grace Ellery Channing and the Whitman Calendar

Iowa Research Online

Volume 12 Number 4 ( 1995) pps. 252-256 
Grace Ellery Channing and the Whitman Calendar 
Joann Krieg 
ISSN 0737-0679 (Print) 
ISSN 2153-3695 (Online) 
Copyright © 1995 Joann Krieg 
Recommended Citation 
Krieg, Joann. "Grace Ellery Channing and the Whitman Calendar." Walt Whitman Quarterly 
Review 12 (Spring 1995), 252-256. https://doi.org/10.13008/2153-3695.1460 
This Note is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in 
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, 
please contact lib-ir@uiowa.edu. 
24 Fifty Years Work Without Wages, 7, 9, 131. 
25 Unpublished diary, Angeli-Dennis Papers. 
GRACE ELLERY CHANNING AND THE WHITMAN CALENDAR 
In documenting Whitman's brief time of celebrity in 1887-1888 and the 
commercialization of his name that accompanied it (e.g., the Walt Whitman 
cigar), David Reynolds in Walt Whitman's America makes reference to Grace 
Ellery Channing, "a Pasadena woman," who, he says, requested permission 
"to publish a Walt Whitman calendar, with illustrated excerpts from his po-
ems."l Not certain as to whether or not the calendar ever appeared, Reynolds 
moves on to yet another example, the Whitman tree dedicated by public school 
students in Bath, Maine in 1889. Grace Channing's connections to the world 
of nineteenth-century literature and to Whitman are deserving of greater 
acknowledgement than this single passing, and not even footnoted, reference 
in Reynolds's book. 
Grace Ellery Channing (1862-1937) was the daughter of William F. 
Channing, medical doctor, inventor, and son of the highly esteemed Unitar-
ian clergyman, William Ellery Channing, whose writings greatly influenced 
the young Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her mother was Mary Tarr Channing, sis-
ter of Ellen Tarr who became the wife of Whitman's famous champion, Will-
iam Douglas O'Connor. Grace's numerous New England relatives included 
cousin Thomas Wentworth Higginson. As a young girl growing up in Provi-
dence, Rhode Island, Grace Channing became great friends with Charlotte 
Perkins Gilman, whose family was also among New England's most illustri-
ous and included her grandfather, Lyman Beecher, and her great aunt Harriet 
Beecher Stowe. 
Fostered by their mutual background and a shared longing for literary ca-
reers, the bonds between Grace and Charlotte grew strong, and in 1885 when 
Charlotte found herself, soon after the birth of her daughter Katherine, des-
perately unhappy in her marriage to the artist Walter Stetson, Grace's parents 
invited her to visit them in their Pasadena, California, home. The Channings 
had moved to California on the advice of Grace's doctor when her persistent 
respiratory problems were diagnosed as tuberculosis, and they were pleased to 
provide help to their daughter's friend and companionship to Grace in her 
illness. Without the distractions of husband and baby, Charlotte was able to 
paint a bit, and she and Grace wrote a play. In 1887 when Charlotte, having 
endured the S. Weir Mitchell treatment of her nervous disorder so dramati-
cally portrayed in her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," reached a separa-
tion agreement with her husband, the Channings rented a small house for her 
and her daughter very near their Pasadena home. Grace and Charlotte re-
sumed their joint writing ventures, and, when Charlotte's husband came to 
visit, her parents encouraged him to remain by making a room in their home 
into a studio where he could work. 
Under this arrangement, and with the Channings-especially Grace-ac-
tively promoting Walter Stetson's career, Charlotte's emotional life improved 
252 
and her career flourished. Increasingly engaged in the cause of female suf-
frage, the nascent labor movement, and later in Edward Bellamy's Nationalist 
clubs, she had little time for her husband and daughter. Grace became more 
and more important in their lives. In 1894 Charlotte succeeded in obtaining a 
California divorce, and before the year was out Grace Channing married Walter 
Stetson. After a period of trying to maintain herself, her child, an ailing mother, 
and a succession of female lovers, Charlotte made the then unprecedented 
move of relinquishing Katherine to her father. Grace then became mother to 
Charlotte's child, freeing Charlotte to become the successful orator and au-
thor she proved to be. 
In the winter of 1887, when Charlotte reached the lowest depths of depres-
sion, it was Grace Channing who did all she could to improve her spirits with 
a steady flow of letters filled with plans for work.2 Grace had entered upon a 
great project, editing the journals of her grandfather William Ellery Channing, 
and also had hit upon an idea that she hoped would further Walter Stetson's 
career, an illustrated calendar featuring excerpts from Leaves of Grass. The 
genesis of the idea was no doubt the visit of her uncle, William Douglas 
O'Connor, who had all but dragged his ailing body to her parents' Pasadena 
home in February of that year. 3 O'Connor and the Channings had shared 
happy times when, as a child, Grace had accompanied her parents on visits to 
the Washington, D.C., home of her aunt Ellen and husband where they lis-
tened in awe to the wide-ranging and highly volatile conversations of her uncle's 
circle of friends. But, as Grace wrote in her unpublished memoir, all the oth-
ers "were frankly subsidiary to the two friends, the two brilliant figures of 
Whitman and O'Connor."4 Her reaction to Whitman at the time was that "he 
looked like an amiable lion," but that he had none of O'Connor's charm: 
"One sat on his knee and allowed him to stroke one's curls, but always with an 
eye to wriggling away."5 The Channings were not present when O'Connor 
and Whitman had their great falling out, sometime in 1872, but her unpub-
lished memoir contains the account of its effect on her parents and their un-
derstanding of its cause. 6 
In 1883, a year after his reconciliation with Whitman, William O'Connor 
left with his niece a gift for her friend Charlotte, a copy of Leaves of Grass. 
Charlotte wrote in her diary that she was "obliged" to decline the gift "as I had 
promised Walter I would not read it."7 Walter was at that time engaged to 
Charlotte and professed a fear that his future wife would dread the marriage 
bed if she read Whitman: "I did not want her to think all men such animals as 
Whitman described them," he noted in his diary.s Two months after Char-
lotte had obeyed his wishes and declined to read Leaves~ Stetson found him-
self, while at his morning bath, measuring his own naked body against the 
standards of physicality expressed in Whitman's poems. Obviously worried 
that he may have been wrong in his prohibition, and only vaguely conscious of 
his underlying fear of not measuring up to expectations that the poems might 
arouse in his future wife, he argues with himself in his diary and gives us a rare 
insight into contemporary male reactions to Whitman's blatant sensuality: 
I wanted her to find love and the sexual relations something so holy and lovely that 
it goes into some hidden place to enjoy its holiness rather than stands in the market 
253 
places and cries up the odor of its perspiration, the action of its phallus, the hairiness 
of sweating breasts-and all the Whitman delicacies ... . But, said I to myself, surely 
she should have a chance. She is pure and honest. Let her read it .... If Whitman's 
tales of harlots and dithyrambic explanations of generation can make her believe my 
love to be weak and ill-so be it. 9 
Stetson had not changed his mind about Whitman when he responded to 
Grace Channing's letter suggesting the calendar. Although to her he claimed 
to "think more highly, and probably more truly" of the poet at each rereading 
of his work, he confided to his diary, "Whitman suggests a satyr to me-a very 
knowing one toO."10 As to the calendar design, he proposed individual pages 
31/2" x 4" "and a photogravure in some warm tint of the head of the poet, 
surrounded by a sort of wreath oflilac leaves and pine (with cones and needles 
of course)."ll Continuing, he described a rather macabre, Hamlet-like deco-
ration: "Then I thought that at the sides I could faintly-I mean delicately-
indicate the evolution out of mortality to life that is so strong a feature in many 
of the poems, by a half-buried inoffensive skull, out of surface of which-
merges the 'leaves of grass,' with their seeds, perhaps." Anticipating that this 
might seem to Grace "rather ghastly," he claimed not to know of any better 
way to express the death-in to-life cycle "than by the accepted emblem of death 
out of which grows grass that so pleases [Whitman]." 12 
The idea of the calendar did not please Whitman. In August of 1888 he told 
Horace Traubel: 
I not only don't enthuse-I do not even approve. Leaves of Grass does not lend 
itself to piecemeal quotation: can only find its reflection in ensemble, ensemble: can-
not be rendered by any selection of pretty lines, strange allusions, passages from here 
and there: it belongs to bulk, mass, unity: must be seen with reference to its eligibility 
to express world-meanings rather than literary prettinesses. 13 
Yes, he admitted, "Grace Channing is a bright, good girl, too, and might be 
trusted to do what could be done in that sort of work and with Leaves of 
Grass. But my first impression was a bad one and I have not moved from it. I 
shall not interfere . . . but I shall have my friends know that I don't endorse 
calendars or any other such miniaturing from Leaves of Grass."14 
When there was no response to the proposal for over a year, William 
O'Connor attempted to prod the poet by sending a copy of Stetson's letter 
(quoted above) to Grace. Acknowledging to Traubel Stetson's artistic abili-
ties, Whitman again dismissed the idea with the comment: "But I am always 
asking myself about all that calendar business-what's the use? I can't see that 
it leads to anything worth while: but I'm not responsible for it: I wash my 
hands of it."15 The following day, regretful perhaps at his previous outburst, 
Whitman said of the calendar suggestion that it was "noteworthy." But it was 
never produced. Whitman did not respond to Grace or to Walter, and so 
O'Connor excused the poet to his niece, claiming illness made it difficult for 
him to make such decisions. 16 It is clear that even in old age and despite his 
somewhat unseemly grasping after celebrity, Whitman never lost his vision of 
the organic unity of Leaves and its essential harmony. 
254 
Grace Ellery Channing edited her grandfather's memoirs and continued to 
pursue a writing career} eventually publishing many essays, short stories and 
poems, and reporting from Europe as a war correspondent in World War 1. In 
1899 (the same year Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" appeared), she pub-
lished a collection of poems titled Sea-Drift, named after a section of Leaves of 
Grass. The poems were largely the product of a visit to Italy that extended 
from October 1890 to November 1893. When news of Whitman's death 
reached her there, she responded with a poem, "The Voiceless Syllables of 
Grass," whose title blends two of the poet's images. With no attempt to emu-
late Whitman's style, she offers a simple abba stanza to convey her preference 
for the silent grass as tribute to his memory, rather than Italy's laurel wreaths: 
O'er Tuscan hills I heard it breathed, 
And up the olive slopes it ran, 
And then the laurel all began 
Singing of brows once laurel wreathed; 
Unruflled, silver olives wave, 
Loud sings the laurel where I pass, 
But louder still I hear the grass 
The grass, now growing on a grave. 17 
Hofstra University 
NOTES 
JOANN P. KruEG 
David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America (New York: Knopf, 1994),569. 
2 Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860-1896 
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 155. 
3 Florence Bernstein Freedman, William Douglas O'Connor. Walt Whitman's Chosen 
Knight (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985), 324. 
4 Freedman, 255. 
5 Freedman, 255. 
6 Freedman, 255-257. 
7 Hill, 108. For more on the influence of Whitman on Gilman see my "Charlotte 
Perkins Gilman and the Whitman Connection," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1 (March 
1984),21-25, and Denise D. Knight, '''With the First Grass-Blade': Whitman's Influ-
ence on the Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 11 
(Summer 1993), 18-29. 
8 Mary Armfield Hill, Endure: The Diaries of Charles Walter Stetson (philadelphia: Temple 
University Press, 1982),201. 
255 
9 Hill, Endure, 201-202. 
10 Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 3 vols. (New York: Rowman and 
Littlefield, 1961), 1: 1 0; Hill, 343. 
11 Traubel, 1: 10. 
12 Traubel, 1: 10. Channing may in fact not have found this ghastly; her reaction to 
Whitman's "The City Dead-House" was to write O'Connor, "Walt has never written 
anything so divinely beautiful" (Traubel, 1:74). 
13 Traubel,2:115. 
14 Traubel,2:115-116. 
15 Traubel,3:11. 
16 Freedman, 325. 
17 Grace Channing, Sea-Drift (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899),61-62. 
256 


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