Sandwiched In

Sandwiched In: A Queer Meeting: Wilde and Whitman in Camden, NJ

The year is 1882, celebrated Victorian novelist Oscar Wilde has just arrived in NYC to begin the first of his many lectures, in America, on the philosophy of beauty. Right after finishing his lecture in Washington Square Park, Wilde demands to his press team to arrange for him to meet Walt Whitman, who he knew lived in Camden, across from Philadelphia which was his next lecture stop. Why was Wilde so insistent and infatuated with meeting Whitman? Literary scholars have written that Wilde’s major motive to meet Whitman was to learn how to become a literary celebrity. A motive that has not been discussed in scholarship, but is the starting point for this talk, is Wilde’s claim to a journalist that he still had the “kiss of Whitman on his lips.” Stony Brook University’s 19th Century American Literature expert Andrew Rimby returns to PWPL to argue that Wilde's desire to meet Whitman was not motivated for knowledge about becoming a literary celebrity but about meeting an American poet who openly discussed male same-sex desire in his literature.