OVER DEZE AFLEVERING
Drift off to sleep learning about Walt Whitman, the poet of Leaves of Grass, and the most openly homoerotic voice in nineteenth-century American literature.
Born May 31, 1819, at West Hills on Long Island, Whitman left school at eleven to work as a printer's apprentice in Brooklyn, taught in one-room schoolhouses, edited newspapers, and rode the Fulton Ferry and the Broadway omnibuses for the love of the crowds. In July 1855 he self-published Leaves of Grass, twelve poems, no rhyme, no author's name on the cover, and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to tell him, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." In 1860 he added the Calamus poems, celebrating what he called "adhesiveness" and "manly love," and published them under his own name. When his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg in December 1862, Whitman went to Washington and stayed through the Civil War, visiting wounded soldiers in the hospital wards almost daily with oranges, writing paper, and tobacco in his coat pockets. There, on a stormy night in early 1865, he met Peter Doyle, a 21-year-old horsecar conductor and former Confederate soldier: "We were familiar at once, I put my hand on his knee, we understood." They were inseparable for eight years, and Doyle kept Whitman's letters for the rest of his life. In June 1865 Interior Secretary James Harlan fired Whitman for writing "that book"; his friend William O'Connor got him a new job the next day and wrote the pamphlet that named him The Good Gray Poet. After a stroke in 1873 Whitman moved to Camden, New Jersey, bought the small house at 328 Mickle Street in 1884, received Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter and a stream of young admirers, and in 1890 refused John Addington Symonds's direct question about Calamus, while designing his own granite tomb at Harleigh Cemetery. He died at home on March 26, 1892, and more than a thousand people came to the house.
This episode is told twice, first at a natural pace, then again slowly with long pauses to guide you into sleep. Imagery includes the tidal flats of Long Island, a Brooklyn print shop, the lamplit Civil War wards of Washington, a horsecar in the rain, and a cluttered front room in Camden with the door left open.
🌙 Perfect for: sleep stories, LGBTQ+ history, gay poets, American literature, Civil War history, bedtime meditation, queer history podcast
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"I stop somewhere waiting for you." — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1855
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