Peter Doyle

Walt Whitman's friend and lover, Peter Doyle, was the son of Irish immigrants, grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, and fought in the Confederate army. He was working as a streetcar conductor when he met Whitman, and the two hit it off right away. Doyle was at Ford's Theater during Lincoln's assassination and might have inspired Whitman's Memoranda During the War. Most of their relationship is understood through their correspondence, and Doyle permitted the publication of Whitman's letters to him. Whitman and Doyle enjoyed spending time with each other's families and often shared poems and limericks. According to Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price in their biographical essay "Walt Whitman," to Whitman, "Doyle represented America's future: healthy, witty, handsome, good-humored, hard-working, enamored of good times, he gave Whitman's life some energy and hope during an otherwise bleak time." Doyle even nursed Whitman when his health was failing.

Sources:
The Walt Whitman Archive
Gay History Project: http://www.eriegaynews.com/news/article.php?recordid=200910whitmandoyle

Further Exploration: Reviews

The post I intend to develop further is the one pertaining to reviews. There is a great deal of criticism available to analyze, and I am interested in how such an initially controversial work became part of the canon and changed our expectations of poetry. I've considered approaching this chronologically, just tracking shifts in the reception of Leaves of Grass over the years to recognize patterns, etc. but that approach isn't set in stone yet. In my first entry about reviews, what stands out to me the most is Whitman's conviction about the importance of his work to the future of American writing, and the equally strong conviction on the part of the naysayers that his work threatens the definition of poetry. History appears to have vindicated both of these judgments, so the question I most want to answer is "what does this mean?" but it's far too broad in scope for both my time constraints and my expertise. Considering the reactions of reviewers, including Whitman himself, what's more radical, his form or content? Once he demolished the boundaries between high culture and low culture, language and song, intellectual labor and manual labor, writer and reader, individual and multitude, nature and culture, could there be any going back? On a somewhat related note, I wonder whether Whitman's work is so celebrated now that people judge other poetry by his standards, to the exclusion of other traditions or innovations; has his approach been swallowed up and regurgitated by the very literary establishment he defied?

"What does it mean?!"

Whitman in Popular Culture

1.
Whitman's image sold cigars! The same self-promotion which enhanced his literary presence was effective in marketing things like smokes, alcohol, and medicine. Walt Whitman: the original "most interesting man in the world," perhaps.

2. Fame (1980): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG-wl2qqD7Y
"I Sing the Body Electric:" Well, they're singing, they allude to his poem's title, and they certainly celebrate their bodies and their individual and universal greatness, but beyond that there's not a great resemblance.

3. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1568/is_n3_v30/ai_20856066/
In which it is claimed that former president Bill Clinton flirted/bonded with both Hillary and Monica via Leaves of Grass. This is where the poet of the body meets, um, the president of the body. There is something to be said of the skill for the common touch both men exhibited. Perhaps the less said in this case, the better.

4. Isadora Duncan enjoyed Whitman's poetry and even danced to it. Contemporary-dance.org says "Isadora consults works about all types of dance carefully before declaring that her only dance masters would be Jean Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman, and Friedrich Nietzche."

5. Federico Garcia Lorca: "Ode to Walt Whitman"
This is intense; it's not one of his gypsy-style poems. "Not for a moment, Walt Whitman, lovely old man / have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies"--nice, right? And then it's dozens of the other-F-word and "life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred."