Peter Doyle

Peter Doyle was Whitman’s long-time friend and companion whom Whitman met while riding on a Washington horsecar after work in 1865. Doyle, an Irish American immigrant, was working in Washington as a conductor following his time in the confederate army where he had participated in some of the bloodiest battles in American history. While Whitman and Doyle were polar opposites, both in terms of their physical appearance as well as their backgrounds (intellectually and politically), they were immediately drawn to one another and would spend the greater part of their lives together until Whitman’s death, although the two never actually lived with one another. The difference in their appearance is striking – Whitman, 45 in 1865, was tall, paunchy and graying significantly by the time he met the boyish 21 year old Doyle who stood at a mere five-foot eight and had smallish features to boot (the two portraits of Whitman and Doyle are reminiscent of a child sitting on Santa’s lap). Doyle likely appealed to Whitman’s continued sense of himself as a working man and one of the “roughs,” despite his increasingly well known literary status. Doyle would be a source of inspiration for Whitman for some of the later Calamus poems. In addition, Doyle presence at Ford’s theater the night of Lincoln’s assassination makes him a likely source for some of the specifics of the event that Whitman outlines in his poetry as well as in Specimen Days. The use of fixed rhyme in meter in O Captain! My Captain! may have also been inspired by Doyle who was a lover of limericks given his Irish background.