Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie

Dougherty, James. Walt Whitman and the Citizen's Eye [review]

Describes the amusing 1950s controversy surrounding the naming of the Walt Whitman Bridge connecting Pennsylvania and New Jersey

Krieg, Joann P

English

Democracy in Action: Naming the Bridge for Walt Whitman

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 11, no. 4

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Spring 1994

Folsom, Ed

Describes Thomas Eakins' recently discovered photographs of a nude man who may be Walt Whitman; the photographs are printed on the back cover of the journal

NOTES 
On the Back Cover: WHITMAN NAKED? 
Over the years, poets and critics have speculated about the possibility that there 
might have been a Thomas Eakins painting or photograph of Whitman in the 
nude. The poet Philip Dacey, for example, in "Thomas Eakins: The Secret 
Whitman Sitting" (Hudson Review 41 [1988], 489-492), offers a dramatic 
monologue in which Eakins tells about the imagined time he painted Whitman 
nude: "I helped him / out of his robe and shawl-like blanket, feeling / the while 
like a nurse about to bathe a patient. . .. " Even naked, Whitman manages to 
strike a pose, construct an identity: "He was giving me The Good Gray Poet 
down / to his last disguise. Even the face he showed / was itself a mask, formal, 
hieratic, / as if he meant to say, 'Even while you should / think you caught me, 
behold, I have escaped you.' " 
An Eakins photograph of Whitman "undisguised and naked" may in fact 
exist. The multiple photograph reproduced on. the back cover of this issue (with 
permission of The Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California) 
is one of a series of such multiple photographs of naked men and women that 
Eakins left behind; this one is now simply labeled "old man" and bears a 
striking resemblance to Whitman. Its date is uncertain -sometime in the 
1880s. If the "old man" is not Whitman, Eakins clearly found a model who was 
a ringer for Whitman, a stand-in who could serve Eakins as Whitman's body-
double for his form studies. This photo of the confident and proud old man 
stripped but, as Dacey suggests, still giving us The Good Gray Poet down to his 
last disguise, recalls the opening of Whitman's first self-review of Leaves of 
Grass: 
Very devilish to some, and very divine to some, will appear the poet of these new poems, 
the "Leaves of Grass"; an attempt, as they are, of a naive, masculine, affectionate, 
contemplative, sensual, imperious person, to cast into literature not only his own grit and 
arrogance, but his own flesh and form, undraped, regardless of models, regardless of 
modesty or law, and ignorant or silently scornful, as at first appears, of all except his own 
presence and experience .... (Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. 
Blodgett [New York: Norton, 1973], 777) 
This Eakins multiple photograph was published for the first time in a 
catalogue of an exhibit of newly discovered Eakins materials (Photographer 
Thomas Eakins [Philadelphia: Olympia Galleries, 1981]), where it is labelled 
only "old man." It should come as no shock that Whitman would pose nude. 
The poet who portrayed himself in "Song of Myself' as "hankering, gross, 
mystical, nude," often swam naked as a young man (in scenes like those later 
made familiar in Eakins's "Swimming Hole" painting and photos). In Specimen 
Days ("A Sun-Bath-Nakedness"), Whitman tells of his days spent in the nude 
by Timber Creek in the late 1870s, when he would take an "Adamic air-bath" 
200 
and enjoy "two or three hours of freedom, bathing, no talk, no bonds, no dress, 
no books, no manners." "Nature was naked, and I was also," wrote Whitman, 
arguing that "nakedness" was not "indecent," that pe experienced "moods 
when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves 
indecent." Sounding like a supporter of Eakin's contrQversial insistence on the 
undraped figure as essential for an artist's training, Whitman celebrated the 
"purity" of nakedness, and he suggested that those "many thousands" who had 
not experienced "the free exhilarating extasy of nakedness" could not know 
"what faith or art or health really is," for "the whole curriculum of first-class 
philosophy, beauty, heroism, form" derived from the "natural and religious 
idea of Nakedness" (PW 1:150-152). Around this time, in 1879, Herbert 
Gilchrist sketched Whitman naked (except for hat and shoes) by Timber Creek 
(see back cover, WWQR 9 [Spring 1992]). 
If this multiple photograph is of Whitman, it probably was taken some-
time between the mid-1880s and early 1888, after he and Eakins met but before 
Whitman suffered a severe stroke in June of 1888. In 1887, Whitman was in 
relatively good health (following his recovery from an earlier stroke) and was 
busy posing for several artists, including Eakins, Gilchrist, Sidney Morse, and 
J. W. Alexander ("Am sculpted & portraited lately," he wrote in June of 1887 
[Carr. 4: 104]). 
Eakins photographed many men and women of various ages and body 
types (though the man in this photograph is strikingly older than any of the 
others); he almost always posed them in the same seven postures represented in 
this multiple photograph. Many of the models were Eakins's students at the 
Pennsylvania Academy; Eakins himself posed for ' one series. This group of 
photos furnished him with a storehouse of accurate representations of the 
human body for use in his paintings and art classes. Eakins also used the photos 
to illustrate "the general axes of weight and action" and "the centers of 
gravity" of the human figure. He referred to these photographs as his "naked 
series," and he began taking them in 1882, mounting each multiple photograph 
on a piece of light blue textured cardboard. Sometime after Eakins's forced 
resignation from the Pennsylvania Academy in 1886 (in part a result of his 
photographying female students in the nude), a package of the "naked series" 
photographs (including this one) ended up in the hands of Edward H. Coates, 
Chairman of the Committee on Instruction; the images remained in Coates's 
safe deposit box and resurfaced only in the late 1970s (see Ellwood C. Parry, 
III, "Introduction," Photographer Thomas Eakins, n.p.; and Lloyd Goodrich, 
Thomas Eakins [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982], 1:246-248). 
Since Eakins began painting Whitman's portrait in 1887 (and started at 
least one other portrait of the poet as well as taking several photographic 
portraits during the last years of the poet's life), it would have made sense for 
him to have made a photographic record of Whitman's form. In addition, 
Eakins's associates, Samuel Murray and William (j)'Donovan, both sculpted 
Whitman, and both used Eakins's various photogr~phs of Whitman for their 
work (see Gordon Hendricks, The Photographs of 11!zomas Eakins [New York: 
Grossman, 1972], IOn.). 
I discuss this image along with the various photographs of Whitman with 
young men in "Whitman's Calamus Photographs" in Betsy Erkkila and Jay 
201 
Grossman, eds., Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies (New 
York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 
The University of Iowa ED FOLSOM 
202 


Whitman Naked?

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 11, no. 3

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 12, no. 2

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 12, no. 2

Examines Whitman's journalism, focusing on his stories and editorials like "A Lazy Day" that present the author in a "slacker pose"; argues that while Whitman's "agitations for public space change over time," he "ultimately champions the notion of allocating higher grounds for public use, allowing all city-dwellers the opportunity to experience the all-encompassing power of the panoramic.

Wacker, Jill

Sacred Panoramas: Walt Whitman and New York City Parks

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 11, no. 4

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