Whitman in Love

About

Whitman in Love draws from the poet’s “Live Oak, with Moss” — a sequence of poems composed in the 1850s and widely recognized as among the earliest sustained expressions of same-sex love in American literature. Later camouflaged in the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass, the poems trace an emotional arc of desire, tenderness, heartbreak, and resilience. Whitman in Love places these verses in conversation with contemporary voices and personal relationships that shaped Whitman’s inner life and artistic imagination. The result is a theatrical portrait of the poet not as a monument, but as a man: yearning, beloved, vulnerable, and transformed by love.