A poetic muse.
Regardless of whether he was a lover, a very close friend, etc., Doyle is someone dear who inspired Whitman in ways that took the poet to learn, experience, and create ideas. Perhaps it's no wonder why Whitman marvels and beholds working men -- he happens to know a great one himself! We see the amiable qualities of supporting oneself through physical labor, shoveling through the rank of not only being a worker, but also out of the mere generalization of a worker -- the man behind the wheel, the gun, etc. Doyle represents the lovable, loyal family man that becomes linked with the workingman character in poems such as "Song of Myself" and especially so in "Song of Occupations". There's also his self-dubbed nickname, "Pete the Great", that shares the same "stance" and swagger as Whitman's message of "I am me and you are you" and "I am the cosmos" -- extended even more with Whitman describing him as a "hearty full-blooded everyday divinely generous working man: a hail-fellow-well-met".
There is also, to note, the notion that Doyle may have influenced Whitman's decision to remove certain poems from his 1867 version of Leaves of Grass. According to Streitmatter:
For some scholars, the strongest impact of the relationship is found in the works Whitman deleted from the 1867 edition. That is, Whitman removed a number of poems that had appeared in the previous edition and that critics characterize as expressing the poet’s earlier “self-doubt and despair.” They say that Whitman eliminated these works because he’d now found the love of his life and therefore was in a “more optimistic mood.” In the words of one scholar, “Walt’s new-found confidence in love was, in large measure, a result of his satisfying relationship with Pete.”
If this is the case, it really makes me wonder about the subtle changes in Whitman's poetry that came from knowing Doyle -- the subtle things only those two would have known, little inside jokes or sayings between them that may seem normal but hold more weight. The powers of such a muse are vast -- he is Pete the Great, in the end.
Digression.
I actually find the photo posted on the motherblog even more interesting after reading this from Veasey's article:
Whitman was a burly six feet tall; Doyle, a slender five foot eight. Their differences extended beyond the physical. Whitman was a government clerk, journalist, and a published poet; Doyle, a workingman supporting his widowed mother and younger siblings. Whitman prided himself on patriotism; his brother George was a Union soldier, and he’d spent the last two years nursing the wounded in Washington’s army hospitals. Doyle had been a Confederate artilleryman, who’d obtained release from federal prison by claiming to be a British subject (born in Limerick, Ireland, he and his family emigrated here when he was a child). Pete and Walt were living proof that opposites attract.
In the photo (if we just consider it true in its black and white form), the two's opposite appearances come out more. Here we have the older Whitman and younger Doyle, the light-hatted Whitman and dark-fedora-ed Doyle, the dark-coated Whitman and the light-coated Doyle, the bulkier Whitman and the slender Doyle, and even the front-facing Whitman and back-facing Doyle. It's funny to think how, really, opposites can attract (though I guess it doesn't always happen, when it does, it really sets off quite a spark and magnetism).
Streitmatter, Rodger. Outlaw Marriages ~ The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples. Beacon Press, 2012. Web. <http://www.lgbt-today.com/news-a-articles/featured-articles/171-walt-whitman-a-peter-doyle--a-gay-poet-a-his-muse->.
Veasey, Jack. "Gay History Project: Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle." Erie Gay News. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.eriegaynews.com/news/article.php?recordid=200910whitmandoyle>.
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