I picked up a pen card from the floor. There were still four mammoth falcons in it. Whitman said: “That’s a present from Jim Redpath: I have made good use of it:” and he added: “I find I get to like the vast pens: they give me something to take real hold of: they encourage me to write spacious things.” He laughed. “There’s a spiritual side of the simplest physical phenomena: not only a spiritual side: more than that: a spiritual outcome.”

W[hitman] needs a mammoth pen holder. He showed me the big pen squeezed into a little holder.

-Horace Traubel

          Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 9 vols (1906-1996) 4: 14, 4 : 51.