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Thank you, gem94. I’ve wasted an afternoon on this, based on Walt Whitman having been responsible for the first blurb (but not for the word itself).

After having to set 4167 aside for purely personal reasons, I welcomed this divertissement and thoroughly enjoyed it. Apropos of nothing, the subject of the author’s most famous work is something used by an addiction services charity I used to chair. (The accidental connection to addiction and charity is neither hint nor spoiler, btw!)

Come to think of it, “addiction” is probably the right term for the crossword habit: difficult to kick and one finds oneself in pursuit of ever “harder stuff”. It’s certainly not a hobby. All hobbies are simply different versions of the meta-hobby: buying kit. (Look at any golfer, photographer, fisherman etc. I rest my case.)

I seem to be in a minority of people on this one. I happily solved the clues and the grid and have the two instructions but have come horribly unstuck with the end game. Par for the course with me. I’ve spent the last week picking it up and putting it down with ever more attempts scribbled in margins. Helpful nudge anyone?

Yikes Meant to post this against last week’s puzzle. I got this one ! Please ignore!

I agree with gitto — the whole crossword took me as long as the first clue did last week! Quite fun bit of frippery.

I can’t quite see in 8d why what I put the case of disease in means stray, if anyone could just close that loop for me please...

No longer scorn = SDEIN; S(DE)IN

Thanks buddy, but I'm still not seeing it. The definition is fine, it's the wordplay. I see the DE, but how do we get SIN from "stray"? Is it just a bit of loose clueing? I mean, I suppose sinning is indeed a sort of going astray, but I really don't see anything in Chambers' definitions of either sin or stray to justify one clueing the other, unless there's some clever twist I'm missing...

Chambers gives for 'stray' "to wander away ... from the right way", which is surely enough to define 'sin' even though the entry for the latter doesn't do it that way.

I hope we can keep to the practice of not giving answers on here, especially in capital letters!