Let us raise a tin cup of Bass barleywine in honor of Walt Whitman‘s 204th birthday!
Has there ever been a poet so thoroughly American as Whitman? His book of verse, Leaves Of Grass (1855), holds the very essence of what it means to be an American. It also reflects on the ways in which our country’s ideals have been forsaken. Whitman’s personal life suffered much because of our American Puritan taboos against sex.
For too many people, and you know who I mean, Whitman is also the USA’s biggest embarrassment. He writes that for our democracy to be true, the American ideal of universal equality must embrace LGBTQ people. Whitman is a subversive and radical poet. American school children for the past 60 years have been carefully protected from exposure to him. Leaves Of Grass has been removed from school libraries in Florida, but it’s not the first time Whitman has been canceled. I didn’t read Whitman until I was finished with college, when my mother, of all people, gave me a volume of Leaves Of Grass as a gift.
A leaf for hand in hand;
You natural persons old and young!
You on the Mississippi and on all the branches and bayous of the Mississippi!
You friendly boatmen and mechanics! You roughs!
You twain! And all processions moving along the streets!
I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for you to walk hand in hand.
I identify as bohemian, but I’m a dilettante compared to Whitman, a true bohemian. He never gave into having a regular job, and he was a singularly solitary man. Probably, not by choice.
Whitman was born on Long Island in New York. He did the usual boy things until he was 11 years old, when he quit school. He ran errands for a lawyer and a doctor, and then became an apprentice typesetter for a Brooklyn newspaper.
He then taught school in several small villages while contributing articles to various periodicals. He left country life for the big city. In New York City, he worked for newspapers, starting as a typesetter and then working his way up to reporter, feature writer and eventually an editor. Whitman also took to a life of enjoying theatre, cafes and nightclubs. He went to art exhibitions, museum openings and the opera. He watched the ships come into the harbor and walked among the people of the great city. He had a habit of sitting near the hot, rugged carriage drivers. He crossed back and forth on the Brooklyn ferry to gaze at the deck hands. Because he was repressing his gayness, he felt alone in the crowd. He liked to watch.
Sometime after Leaves Of Grass was first published on July 4, 1855 (how American is that?), Whitman suffered a sort of emotional crisis that transformed him from a reliable reporter into a phenomenal poet. In the manner of so many gay men in New York City and San Francisco in late 1970s, he gave up being a dandy and he became a butch clone.
Nowadays, if Whitman is taught in schools at all, there is still so much resistance to identifying him as queer. Maybe it ispassages like this that scare the MAGAs:
I share the midnight orgies of young men
I pick out some low person for my dearest friend,
He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate, he shall be condemned by others for deeds done
I will play a part no longer, why should I exile myself from my companions?
When the Civil War began in 1861, Whitman moved to Washington DC to volunteer as a nurse for injured Union soldiers. He made his living during this period by working as a clerk for the federal government.
Whitman met young handsome Irish-American Peter Doyle in 1865 when the older poet boarded a streetcar with Doyle working as the conductor. Doyle:
“He was the only passenger; it was a lonely night, so I thought I would go in and talk with him. Something in me made me do it. He used to say there was something in me that had the same effect on him. We were familiar at once. I put my hand on his knee… we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip, in fact he went all the way back with me.”
Whitman stayed on that streetcar until Doyle ended his shift and the two men then spent their first night together.
The men had a committed relationship and Whitman wanted them to live as a couple, but Doyle thought it was his duty, as the oldest unmarried son, to live with and care for his widowed mother in the house he rented for them. The two men would have to get a hotel room or brave sneaking into Whitman’s room at a boardinghouse to be together.
For the next two decades, Whitman and Doyle would be a couple and they spent as much time in each other’s company as possible. Whitman wrote this about Doyle:
“He is a hearty full-blooded everyday divinely generous working man: a hail-fellow-well-met.”
Falling in love brought a vigorous change to Whitman’s writing. Doyle became the poet’s muse. When they were apart, the two men would write each other daily. In their correspondence, they spoke of their love for each other. In one letter, Whitman wrote Doyle: “I think of you very often. My love for you is indestructible. I don’t know what I should do if I hadn’t you to think of and look forward to.”
The missives include this passage:
“All I have to say is to say nothing, only a good smacking kiss, and many of them, taking in return many, many, many from my dear, good loving ones too.”
In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke. He had to move in with his family in Camden, New Jersey, so they could take care of him.
Doyle tried, but failed to find a job in Camden. He made frequent journeys from DC to be with his ailing lover. Sadly, the two men were never able to live together. They did, however, continue to correspond and visit with each other, and sometimes traveled together.
For the rest of his life, Whitman continued to revise Leaves Of Grass, with the 1882 version becoming the most important. This edition was published by a prominent Boston publishing house. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts declared the book obscene because of its references to same-sex love; hence the term: “Banned in Boston”.
The obscenity charges brought Whitman world-wide attention, and of course Leaves Of Grass sold even more copies, becoming a big bestseller. Whitman survived all that controversy, and became rich and famous. How American is that?
Whitman’s health worsened in the late 1880s, and he went into a coma in early 1892. He was taken by emphysema when he was 73 years old. Doyle was among the mourners at the funeral.
The USA’s major newspapers published lengthy obituaries and tributes to Whitman. The Washington Post called him: “A poet for all humanity” and the then conservative New York Times lauded him as a literary force: “Who had the courage to speak out”. But none of the obituaries made any reference to Doyle.
Doyle died in 1906, taken by kidney disease when he was just 63 years old. The brief death notices that appeared in newspapers didn’t mention Whitman.
In 2023, Whitman is on the brink of being banned again. At Rutgers-Camden University, a petition with 3,853 names demanded the removal of Whitman’s formidable statue on the campus. Whitman’s seemingly inconsistent and self-contradictory attitudes toward slavery have long been a source of critical debate. Yet, Whitman’s opposition to slavery is clear in Leaves of Grass where he consistently includes Black Americans in his vision of an ideal, multiracial republic and portrays them as beautiful, dignified, and intelligent.
During World War II the American government distributed Whitman’s poetry to the soldiers believing that his celebrations of the American spirit would inspire those tasked with protecting it from fascists.
Whitman’s work has been claimed in the name of racial equality. In a preface to I Hear the People Singing: Selected Poems of Walt Whitman (1946), gay Black poet Langston Hughes wrote:
“Whitman’s “all-embracing words lock arms with workers and farmers, Negroes and whites, Asiatics and Europeans, serfs, and free men, beaming democracy to all.”
A 1970 collection of Whitman’s poetry was published by the United States Information Agency who described Whitman as a man who “mixed indiscriminately” with the people. It was intended for an international audience as an attempt to present Whitman as the representative of a United Stated of America that accepts people of all races.
Yet, Whitman is criticized for the nationalism expressed in Leaves Of Grass and some of his other works. In an essay, Nathanael O’Reilly, a poet who teaches at the University of Texas claims:
“Whitman’s imagined America is arrogant, expansionist, hierarchical, racist and exclusive; such an America is unacceptable to Native Americans, African-Americans, immigrants, the disabled, the infertile, and all those who value equal rights.”
Despite the controversies, Whitman remains a major figure for me. I’m not canceling him! I collect correspondence from notable figures who matter to me, and one of the first, and most pleasing, is a handwritten note from Whitman to the gay painter Thomas Eakins (1844 -1916), where the poet invites the painter over for a tryst, a kind of hand delivered Scruff private message. It’s well-hung below a post card from Truman Capote to Peggy Guggenheim, two other American originals.
I recommend the excellent and very readable: Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (1997) by Gary Schmidgall.
