User:Msrasnw/WWCanary

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Shigeko Ooishi  https://academic.oup.com/jcb/article/35/1/111/2547821

Walt Whitman's canary is held as an exhibit in Bolton Museum. The exhibit is stuffed and mounted on a perch in a life like pose and housed in beneath a bell jar. .

Folsom reports Justin Kaplan (1980) in his Walt Whitman: A Life discussion of the visit to Whitman of one of the "more eccentric sects of Whitman's "apostolic church""; the Bolton Whitmanites from Eagle Street College. Two members of the college Dr. J. Johnston and J. W. Wallace visited in 1890/1891 publishing the diaries of their visits in Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890-1891 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1917). The tale is told therein of the bird came to Bolton:


 * This bird, which was the subject of Whitman's lines, My Canary Bird, died shortly after my visit, and Mrs. Davis [Whitman's housekeeper] had it stuffed. It was brought to Bolton by Dr. Bucke, together with an autographed copy of the lines, in 1891, and presented to Mr. Wallace (pp. 60-61).''

Walt Whitman's canary is noted from his poem 'My Canary Bird' published in the New York Herald on 2 March 1888.

''Did we count great,
 * O soul, to penetrate the themes of mighty books,
 * Absorbing deep and full from thoughts, plays, speculations?
 * But now from thee to me, caged bird, to feel thy joyous warble,
 * Filling the air, the lonesome room, the long forenoon,
 * Is it not just as great, O soul?''

On its death Whitman had the bird stuffed and then bird noted The bird was by the museum from Wllace who recieved it as a gift from Dr Bucke when he visited Bolton in 1891.