Peter Doyle
Peter Doyle was born in Limerick, Ireland sometime around 1845. He came to America around the age of eight. He fought on the side of the Confederacy before being discharged and moving to Washington D.C. He became a street car conductor and a close and intimate friend of Walt Whitman.
It seems that Pete was more than a friend, but instead a lover and the biography available through the Whitman archive speculates about this. It gives great detail of the fluctuating relationship between Pete and Walt and even ties in some of this to Walt's poetry. To be honest i have not read the entire biography yet but their correspondence with one another suggested a very passionate relationship.
Though they are seemingly opposite it is perhaps quite fitting that Whitman would like a man close to his opposite. Whitman tried to encompass all and in that attempt, grabbing a man cut from a different cloth does not seem so strange.
It seems that Pete was more than a friend, but instead a lover and the biography available through the Whitman archive speculates about this. It gives great detail of the fluctuating relationship between Pete and Walt and even ties in some of this to Walt's poetry. To be honest i have not read the entire biography yet but their correspondence with one another suggested a very passionate relationship.
Though they are seemingly opposite it is perhaps quite fitting that Whitman would like a man close to his opposite. Whitman tried to encompass all and in that attempt, grabbing a man cut from a different cloth does not seem so strange.
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