Elderberry Wine and a Kiss

A Poetry Tale about Walt Whitman, told by Hello Doggo.

January, eighteen eighty-two. Oscar Wilde is twenty-seven, long-haired, on a lecture tour of America, and very much in velvet. He takes the ferry across the Delaware to Camden, New Jersey, to meet the most scandalous poet in the country.

Walt Whitman is sixty-two, and living in his brother’s house.

Whitman brought out the elderberry wine, made by his sister-in-law. Wilde drank it. Long afterwards, Joseph Stoddart, the publisher who’d come along, claimed Wilde said that if it had been vinegar he’d have drunk it all the same, so great was his admiration for that man.

Then Whitman took him upstairs to his den, heaped with papers. Whitman announced he would call him Oscar. Out came the milk punch. They talked for two hours.

Wilde told a newspaper that Whitman was the grandest man he had ever seen. Whitman told a reporter that Wilde was a great big splendid boy.

Now. The gossip. Years later, Wilde is said to have told his friend George Ives, a campaigner for gay rights and a tireless diarist, that there was no doubt at all about Whitman’s tastes. Then the boast, as it’s usually told: that he still had the kiss of Walt Whitman on his lips.

Was there a kiss? We have only Wilde’s word, at second hand. And Wilde rarely let the truth spoil a good line.

Whitman, for his part, had already covered himself. Do I contradict myself, he wrote. Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. Possibly including Oscar.