Walt Whitman, best known as the father of modern poetry and American poetry, was also the longtime lover of Peter Doyle, son of a blacksmith, a former Rebel soldier who worked as a streetcar conductor. They were often affectionate in public; their families, and all Whitman’s friends, knew about their relationship. Doyle was a conspicuous influence on many of Whitman’s works.
The couple first met on a Washington, D.C., streetcar in 1865, on a stormy winter night toward the close of the Civil War. Whitman was 45; Doyle, 21. Doyle thought his bearded only passenger, a blanket over his shoulders, looked “like an old sea captain.”
“I thought I would go and talk to him,” Doyle had said in an interview. “Something in me made me do it. He used to say there was something in me had the same effect on him … We were familiar at once. I put my hand on his knee … from that time on we were the biggest sort of friends.”
Whitman was a burly 6-feet tall; Doyle, a slender 5-foot-8. Their differences extended beyond the physical. Whitman was a government clerk, journalist and a published poet; Doyle, a workingman supporting his widowed mother and younger siblings. Whitman prided himself on patriotism; his brother George was a Union soldier, and he’d spent the last two years nursing the wounded in Washington’s army hospitals. Doyle had been a Confederate artilleryman who’d obtained release from federal prison by claiming to be a British subject (born in Limerick, Ireland, he and his family emigrated here when he was a child). Pete and Walt were living proof that opposites attract.
They were a familiar sight on Washington streetcars and at the bar in Georgetown’s Union Hotel. A favorite pastime was to hike along the Potomac River in Maryland, take the ferry to Virginia, and then hike back along the river on the Virginia side.
They were unable to live together due to Doyle’s obligations to his family, though Walt wanted to settle down with him and brought it up repeatedly.
But each man was warmly embraced by the other’s family. Pete would fondly recall dinners at the Whitmans’: “After we had our dinner [Walt’s mother] would always say, ‘Now take a long walk to aid digestion.’ Mrs. Whitman was a lovely woman.” After Whitman’s first stroke in 1873, his mother wrote to Walt to express her confidence in Doyle: “I knew if it was in his power he would cheerfully do everything he could for you.” He lived up to her expectations, nursing Whitman for months. He considered Doyle’s mother Catherine, brothers James, Francis and Edward and sister Margaret — the latter who lived with Doyle — dear friends.
Doyle would have a lasting impact on Whitman’s work. For one thing, Doyle — who was present at Lincoln’s assassination – would shape Whitman’s writings about that tragic event. Doyle had gone to the performance of “My American Cousin” in Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, because he’d heard the Lincolns would be there. He heard the shot and saw John Wilkes Booth leap from Lincoln’s box to the stage, but didn’t know Lincoln was dead until he heard Mary Todd Lincoln cry out, “The president has been shot!” Doyle was one of the last to leave the theater, ordered out by a policeman.
Lincoln had been one of Whitman’s heroes, though they had never met. As a friend of the president’s former secretary John Hay, Whitman had seen Lincoln in person numerous times. He’d written, “I never see the man without feeling that he is one to become personally attached to.” Whitman would use Doyle’s account in “Specimen Days, Memoranda During The War” and lectures.
Doyle also affected Whitman’s most popular Lincoln poem, “O Captain! My Captain!” Doyle came to America with his mother and three brothers on the William Patten in 1852; the ship nearly wrecked in a storm on Good Friday, also the day of Lincoln’s assassination. Whitman knew this. The poem memorializes Lincoln as a ship’s captain, who died while guiding his vessel safely to port through a storm. The poem, unlike most of Whitman’s verse, is metered and rhymed. During their walks, Doyle would often quote limericks to Whitman; the poem’s extant first draft is in free verse, so he likely revised it to impress Doyle. Another poem written around the same time, “Come Up From The Fields Father,” is the only time Whitman ever identified a protagonist with a personal name — Pete.
Doyle also figured prominently in Whitman’s private notebooks, particularly passages cited by some scholars as the most convincing proof of Whitman’s gay sexuality. In the summer of 1870, Whitman began to suspect that Doyle did not return his love. He wrote feverishly, vowing “TO GIVE UP ABSOLUTELY … this … USELESS UNDIGNIFIED PURSUIT OF 16.4.” Sixteen and four are the numeric locations of the initials P.D. in the alphabet. Whitman also later erased the “im” in “him” and replaced it with “er” in these entries.
But before Whitman left to visit his family later that summer, Doyle confessed his love, ending Whitman’s ambivalence. In a July 30 letter, Whitman enthused, “I never dreamed that you made so much of having me with you, nor that you should feel so downcast at losing me.” Soon after, when Doyle griped about his job, Whitman wrote promising “a good smacking kiss, many of them — taking in return many, many from my dear son — good loving ones too.”
Their relationship remained intense during Whitman’s years in Washington. But he suffered a stroke in 1873, which impaired his left arm and leg. He went to live with his brother George in Camden, N.J., considering the arrangement temporary. Whitman’s beloved mother died that same year, taking an emotional toll on him as well. Doyle was by now working a dangerous, stressful job — brakeman — for the Pennsylvania Railroad, but would still visit Whitman daily before his evening shift. Whitman took the precaution of making out a will, in which Doyle was the only non-family member included. In 1874, Whitman forfeited his Washington job, and broke the news to Doyle that his move to Camden would be permanent. In 1875, another stroke affected Whitman’s right side.
For the next two decades, Doyle and Whitman continued to correspond, and Doyle continued to visit regularly, but they began to see less of each other. In 1876, Whitman met another working-class youth, Harry Stafford, a Camden New Republic office clerk in his 20s. Stafford became Walt’s new “darling boy.” Stafford’s parents considered Whitman a “good influence.” Whitman began to spend time at the family’s farm near Timber Creek, about 10 miles from Camden. Walt’s letters told Pete about the farm, but not about Harry. Like Fred Vaughan before him, Stafford would marry in 1884, but he and Whitman would remain friends.
After Doyle’s mother Catherine passed away in 1885, he relocated to Philadelphia. Though Doyle and Whitman remained in touch until 1889, no correspondence exists between 1881-86, as they saw each other frequently.
In 1888, Whitman suffered another stroke and became severely ill. He would live four more years, during which he would publish “November Boughs,” “Goodbye My Fancy” and the so-called “Deathbed Edition” of “Leaves of Grass.” Doyle would be mysteriously absent for most of this time. Whitman speculated to friend Horace Traubel that Doyle “must have got another lay.” On New Year’s Day, 1892, Whitman revised his will to exclude Doyle, who he presumed was dead. But before he passed, Doyle visited him, and explained his absence.
In an interview, Doyle recalled: “In the old days, I had always open doors to Walt — going, coming, staying as I chose. Now, I had to run the gauntlet of Mrs. Davis [Walt’s housekeeper at his own new Mickle Street home] and a nurse and whatnot … Then I had a mad impulse to go over and nurse him. I was his proper nurse — he understood me — I understood him. We loved each other deeply … I should have gone to see him, at least, in spite of everything, I know it now … but it’s all right. Walt realized I never swerved from him — he knows it now. That is enough.”
Whitman died of tuberculosis on March 26, 1892 at age 72. Doyle attended the funeral, and remained part of Whitman’s surviving circle of friends until his own passing at 63 in 1907 from kidney disease.
The most substantial documentation of their relationship is a collection of letters Whitman sent to Doyle from 1868-80, published in 1897 by their mutual friend, psychiatrist/author Richard Maurice Bucke, as “The Calamus Letters.” “Calamus” poems are interspersed between letters in the book. The book included Bucke’s revealing interview with Doyle conducted after Whitman’s death, which Henry James would call “the most charming passage in the volume“ in his 1898 review.
From his interview with Bucke: “I have Walt’s raglan here. Now and then I put it on, lay down … Then he is with me again … I do not ever for a minute lose the old man. He is always nearby … in a crisis, I ask myself, ‘What would Walt do?’ — and whatever I decide Walt would do, that I do.”