To Walt With Love

On Saturday 17th November, Nottingham Contemporary, the city’s premier visual arts venue, plays host to a musical start to Nottingham’s contribution to this year’s ‘Being Human’ Festival of the Humanities with “To Walt With Love”, celebrating the great American poet Walt Whitman and his abiding influence on LGBT+ culture, through poetry, live music and imagery.

Manchester-based male voice choir, The Sunday Boys, and composer Michael Betteridge join up with the University of Nottingham to explore how writers, composers, and equal rights activists have responded, over the last 150 years, to Whitman’s evocations of what he called “the manly love of comrades”. 

Whitman became a gay icon even before the word ‘gay’ acquired its modern meaning, and inspired some of the most memorable modern writing about same-sex love, by figures as diverse as E.M. Forster, Allen Ginsberg, and the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.

 
In advance of the bicentenary of Whitman’s birth next year, University of Nottingham lecturer Mark Sabine will relate the story of Whitman’s poetry of male love and its international reception, drawing on his own research on Whitman’s influence in Portugal and Brazil, and introducing readings from Whitman’s own works and from tributes written by his literary admirers. 

"Whitman had a revolutionary impact on literature – and even, arguably, on politics – on at least three continents”, Mark says. 

“His brilliant use of free verse – poetry without strict rules of rhyme or metre – transformed poetry in English and set the scene for the Modernist literature of the early 20th century.  

“As a champion of liberty and democracy, he inspired political reformers not only across the USA and Europe but also in the young independent states of Latin America. 

“Even more remarkably, he argued that a just and democratic society could not be built without a common commitment to tolerance and love, and he sang the praises of physical love between men as an essential part of his vision of a brighter future.”