Out Spotlight

Most are familiar with "America's Poet" Walt Whitman, and his seminal Leaves of Grass.There was no regular rhyme or rhythm to the lines; they mixed elements of prose and verse, in a colloquial and personal style. The subjects of the poems were the self, the body and the multitude of America. The collection did not come without controversy, many of his poems celebrated sensual pleasure and sexual desire. In Whitman's "Calamus" poems, which dealt with male-male relationships, he celebrated the "love of comrades". While some debate whether he was speaking of homosexuality, most believe he was expressing his feelings and his sexuality.

His works were inspirational for many writers that followed. Today's Out Spotlight is not about Whitman, but of one of the long loves and inspiration in Whitman's life, Peter Doyle.

They met on a winter evening in Washington, D.C., in 1865, when Whitman was there working in the hospitals . The twenty-one-year-old Doyle was the conductor on a Pennsylvania Avenue horsecar, and the forty-five-year-old Whitman was the car's sole passenger. "Doyle recalled, 'We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood . . . From that time on, we were the biggest sort of friends'"

Peter Doyle was born in Limerick, Ireland, on June 3, 1843, to Peter Doyle and Catherine Nash. His family immigrated to the US, when Doyle was around 8, locating to Alexandria, Virginia, and then around 1856-57 "bad times came on" during the general national depression and the family moved to Richmond, VA where his father found work as a blacksmith for the Tredegar Iron Works. On the eve of the Civil War, Tredegar was the largest ironmaker in the South and the fourth largest such employer in the United States. During the Civil War, the Confederates relied heavily on the Tredegar works to supply it with arms.

Doyle came into manhood armed as a Confederate soldier against the Union that Whitman held so dear. He signed up in the Confederate Army one week and one day after Virginia succeeded from the Union, he was seventeen years old. "Military papers described Doyle as 5 feet 8 inches tall, with blue eyes, a light complexion and light-colored hair. Doyle's civilian occupation was given as "cooper,", a barrel or cask maker."

Doyle was marginally literate working man and not a intellectual or social match for Whitman, the well-known poet and federal employee whose Washington friends included Lincoln's former secretary, John Hay, Ohio Congressman and future president James Garfield, and Attorney General of the US, J. Hubley Ashton.

In many ways, Doyle seems an unlikely companion for Whitman, yet, in the ways that mattered most, Doyle was precisely the kind of man Whitman loved best. The poet always followed his own admonition that he wrote in the Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass, to "go freely with powerful uneducated persons". Doyle's youthfulness, grace and good health, was the perfect medicine for the war-weary Whitman, who had spent the previous two years in Washington Union army hospitals nursing the wounded.

"They spent long afternoons riding the streetcars, or eating fresh fruits at Center Market. Evenings were reserved for moonlit walks along the Potomac River that had Whitman reciting Shakespeare's sonnets to Doyle, and Doyle relating his favorite limericks to Whitman. Whitman also relished the opportunity to be part of the young man's large family circle. It included Doyle's widowed mother, Catherine, and his younger brother Edward and sister Margaret, for whom Pete made a home. Also nearby were the families of married brothers James and Francis, and aunt Ann and uncle Michael Nash, whom Whitman counted among his dear friends."

Most associate Doyle with Whitman's "Calamus" poems, but he did not serve as the muse for the verses first published years before they met. The satisfaction that Whitman derived from his relationship with Doyle, however, may have influenced him to drop several of the more anxiety-ridden "Calamus" poems in later editions of Leaves of Grass after 1865. Whitman's expressed affection for the former Confederate artilleryman reinforced the theme of reconciliation in the poet's war writings and his eyewitness narrative of Lincoln's assassination found in Memoranda During the War may have been inspired by Doyle, who was at Ford's Theater on that fateful evening.

Whitman suffered a stroke in January 1873 which caused him to move that year in Camden, New Jersey, to be with his brother George and his sister-in-law. The intensity of Whitman's and Doyle's waned with the time and distance. While in Camden, another gentleman, Harry Stafford, provided Whitman companionship that Doyle was not there to give.

Then in the mid-1880s Doyle and Whitman renewed their relationship more intimately when Doyle now employed by the Pennsylvania Railroad as a baggage master, settled in Philadelphia. He made weekly visits across the river to be with Whitman in Camden. Later the round-the-clock presence of caretakers during the poet's last years eventually alienated Doyle, whose visits became more infrequent. Before Whitman's death in March 1892, Doyle explained to him the reason why he visited so rarely, and the poet understood. Doyle attended Whitman's funeral at Harleigh Cemetery.

Doyle made a lasting contribution to Whitman's biography in 1897 when "he allowed Richard Maurice Bucke to edit and publish Whitman's letters to Doyle, which Doyle had entrusted to Bucke in 1880. Included with the letters was Bucke's interview of Doyle, which Henry James in his 1898 review of the book called 'the most charming passage in the volume'" Their thirty-year relationship from 1865–1892 left a legacy of loving letters from the older poet to his younger companion helps to understand Whitman's emotion and sexuality.

Pete this is a wonderful country out here, & no one knows how big it is till he launches out in the midst of it . . . the general run of all these Western places, city & country is very prosperous, on the rush! plenty of people, plenty to eat, & apparently plenty of money--. . . the most interesting part of my travel has been the Plains . . . Colorado & Western Kansas . . . the herdsmen . . . always on horseback, they call 'em cow-boys . . . I used to like to get among them to talk with them