Sweet and Sour

 Stick Candy

Traubel records, "Mrs Davis handed him a bag of mint-candy and he at once gave me a stick.  'You favor it?' he asked, and then dilated like a child on his own fancy for it."

Lemonade

While planning the menu for his seventieth birthday banquet, Whitman remarked: 'It's a damnable drink, I wouldn't have it.'

--qtd. in Gary Schmidgall,editor,  Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman's Conversations with Horace Traubel 1888-1892 (2001)

So there you have it.  Walt Whitman loved mints and hated lemonade.  He also loved cheap books, sweet corn, and molasses candy and disliked tobacco, fireworks, comedians, and church.  Little details of this sort--theorist Roland Barthes would call them biographemes--seem terribly important, but not simply because they offer intimate glimpses into one particular famous person's private life.  Rather,  they emphasize private history (as opposed to public or grand history) more generally.  I suspect that private history--and what one loved most or humorously hated most--is most relevant and precious to us at the end of our lives. Our preferences mark our points of intersection with the world--in a sense they are more important than political events, cultural movements, economic changes, scientific discoveries.  Horace Traubel, who visited and assisted Whitman during the last four years of his life evidently recognized their importance as well.