Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman, 1887

Today is the birthday of Walter “Walt” Whitman (West Hills, Huntington, Long Island, New York; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892 Camden, New Jersey); poet, essayist, and journalist.  A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works.  Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse.  His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.  Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money.  The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic.  He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892.  When he died at age 72, his funeral became a public spectacle.  He described himself in Leaves of Grass; “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women apart from them, no more modest than immodest.”

Peter Doyle may be the most likely candidate for the love of Whitman’s life.  Doyle was a bus conductor whom Whitman met around 1866, and the two were inseparable for several years. Interviewed in 1895, Doyle said: “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 went all the way back with me.” In his notebooks, Whitman disguised Doyle’s initials using the code “16.4” (P.D. being the 16th and 4th letters of the alphabet).  Oscar Wilde met Whitman in the United States in 1882 and told the homosexual-rights activist George Cecil Ives that Whitman’s sexual orientation was beyond question—”I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips.”

Another possible lover was Bill Duckett. As a teenager, he lived on the same street in Camden and moved in with Whitman, living with him a number of years and serving him in various roles.

There is also some evidence that Whitman had sexual relationships with women. He had a romantic friendship with a New York actress, Ellen Grey, in the spring of 1862, but it is not known whether it was also sexual. He still had a photograph of her decades later, when he moved to Camden, and he called her “an old sweetheart of mine”. In a letter, dated August 21, 1890, he claimed, “I have had six children—two are dead”. This claim has never been corroborated. Toward the end of his life, he often told stories of previous girlfriends and sweethearts and denied an allegation from the New York Herald that he had “never had a love affair”. As Whitman biographer Jerome Loving wrote, “the discussion of Whitman’s sexual orientation will probably continue in spite of whatever evidence emerges.

Excerpts from Leaves of Grass

• Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,
  Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
  You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life. (46)

• Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
  Now I will you to be a bold swimmer…

• I am the teacher of athletes,
  He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
  He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. (47)

• I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?
  I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,
  My words itch at your ears till you understand them.

• It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you,
  Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d. (47)

• I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,
  And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air.
  If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore

• And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me. (49)

• There is that in me — I do not know what it is — but I know it is in me.
  …
  I do not know it — it is without name — it is a word unsaid,
  It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
  Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
  To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me. (50)

• Do I contradict myself?
  Very well then I contradict myself,
  (I am large, I contain multitudes.) (51)

• I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
  I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

• Weep not, child,
  Weep not, my darling,
  With these kisses let me remove your tears,
  The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
  They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
  Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
  They are immortal…

Walter Sickert, photograph by George Charles Beresford, 1911

And today is the birthday of Walter Richard Sickert (Munich 31 May 1860 – 22 January 1942 Bath, Somerset); painter and printmaker who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London.  He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century.  Sickert was a cosmopolitan and eccentric who often favoured ordinary people and urban scenes as his subjects.  His oeuvre also included portraits of well-known personalities and images derived from press photographs.  He is considered a prominent figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism.  Decades after his death, several researchers and theorists suspected Sickert to have been the London-based serial killer Jack the Ripper, although the theory has largely been dismissed.

Gallery

‘Mornington Crescent Nude, Contre-Jour’ (1907)

The Camden Town Murder, 1908

Reclining Nude (Thin Adeline) MET

Portrait of Sickert in 1884 

The Acting Manager or Rehearsal: The End of the Act, (portrait of Helen Carte), c. 1885

La Giuseppina, the Ring (1903-1905)

 

Henry Tonks. Sodales: Mr Steer and Mr Sickert, 1930 

Brighton Pierrots (1915)

Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, c. 1907