GLR March-April 2026

ESSAY Once Upon a Time... in Camden A NDREW R IMBY

O N JANUARY 18, 1882, in a home in Camden, New Jersey, a 27-year-old Oscar Wilde met his American literary idol, the 62-year-old Walt Whitman. At first the two were joined by J. M. Stoddart, a Philadelphia publisher, but eventually Whitman desired more privacy and invited Wilde up to his “den” on the third floor, where they talked for more than two hours. Word got around that the two had engaged in such a riveting literary conversation that the press reached out to both writers to ask about their meeting. The next day Whitman was interviewed by The Philadel phia Press and revealed that he led Wilde to his den so they could be on “thee and thou terms.” Wilde provided more clar ity when he was interviewed by The Boston Herald on Janu ary 29th, saying that meeting Whitman was the closest he would get to meeting an ancient Greek figure. The meeting left such an indelible impression that even after 1892, when Whitman died, Wilde was gossiping that he could still feel “the kiss of Walt Whitman” on his lips. Why was their literary meeting such a hot topic, and why did both describe their en counter in such sensual ways? To attempt an answer to these questions, we need to explore why Wilde was so drawn to Whitman’s poetry. § setti had made it his mission to publish Whitman’s American 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass , but issuing his British edition, Poems by Walt Whitman, came with difficulties. Rossetti turned to John Camden Hotten, a British publisher who specialized in Americana, erotic, and avant-garde poetry, and the two realized that Whitman’s complete edition couldn’t be published in Britain due to recent anti-pornography laws. Rossetti had to decide which erotically themed poems to cut out. The result didn’t land well with Whitman, who called Ros setti’s edition a “horrible dismemberment of my book,” as half of the poems from the 1867 edition had been excised, includ ing “Song of Myself” and the “Children of Adam” cluster. Both the “Children of Adam” and “Calamus” clusters contained erotic language, but “Rossetti included 11 of 40 of those poems [‘Calamus’] that appeared in the 1867 Leaves .” Why was Ros setti comfortable including a selection of “Calamus” poems while removing “Children of Adam”? Unlike the “Children of Adam” poems, which contained Andrew Rimby, host of The Ivory Tower Boiler Room podcast , isauthor of The Pool of Narcissus: Walt Whitman’s Male Homoerotic Poetics. I N 1868, an Irish woman named Lady Jane Wilde had gotten her hands on the first British edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass . Vic torian writer and critic William Michael Ros

mentions of male-female sexual pleasure and reproduction, the “Calamus” poems celebrated the beauty of male-male friend ship and comradeship. Rossetti kept one of the more homo erotically charged “Calamus” poems from Whitman’s 1867 edition, “A Song.” Instead of retaining the poem’s original title, Rossetti changed it to “Love of Comrades.” In the first stanza, the male speaker reveals his mission to “make the most splen did race the sun ever/ shone upon!” and says: “I will make di vine magnetic lands,/ With the love of comrades,/ With the life-long love of comrades.” This model of comradeship can only happen through male male love. The speaker desires to figuratively procreate with his comrades. While erotic love between men and women had to be erased because of Britain’s new anti-pornography laws, homoerotic desire, even a vision of the male speaker figura tively procreating with men, was not removed. When Wilde met Whitman, he revealed that his mother had read all the 1868 poems to him, so Wilde would have been familiar with Whit man’s vision of comradeship and its homoerotic implications. During Wilde’s meeting with the American poet, he told Whitman that when he left Ireland in 1874 to attend Magdalen Literae Humaniores (nicknamed the Classics/Greats), he was at a crossroads, torn between becoming a Classics professor at Oxford or Cambridge or earning his income as a professional writer. After much contemplation, Wilde pursued a career as a poet, and in 1881 published his first volume of poetry. The British magazines, notably the satirical Punch , responded to Wilde’s poems by mocking him as the “Æsthete of Æsthetes!” § W ILDE WAS QUICKLY gaining recognition in London’s literary scene as an Æsthetic poet who “sought to propagate a new gospel of Beauty.” Soon after his poetry was published, theater promoter Richard D’Oyly Carte was in desperate need of a pro ponent of the Æsthetic movement, which mixed “art, idealism and politics,” to give lectures throughout America to promote Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience (1881). Wilde’s Poems was not as lucrative as he’d hoped, so he jumped at the oppor tunity to both receive a stable source of income and embrace his new identity. “On Christmas Eve 1881, a 27-year-old Oscar Wilde wrapped himself in a fur cloak, boarded the SSAri zona at Liverpool, and set off to the U.S. for his 50-date lecture College, Oxford, he brought Whitman’s po etry and “he and his friends carried Leaves to read on their walks.” Before Wilde knew that he would have the opportunity to meet with Whitman (twice) while in America, he was living and breathing Whitman’s verse. After Wilde graduated in 1878 with a bach elor’s degree in Classical Moderations and

Wilde’s comments on the Greekness of Whitman’s poetry and physical appearance seemed to carry a hidden message.

TheG & LR

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