No reporters were invited to witness the meeting between Whitman and Wilde. This was a strange choice for two dandyish men who loved self-promotion, but it was a canny one: they would each give separate interviews afterwards, and double the attention they received. In the two hours they’d spent together, both said they’d had a very pleasant time. “One of the first things I said was that I should call him ‘Oscar,’“ Whitman told a reporter afterwards. “’I like that so much,’ he answered, laying his hand on my knee. He seemed to me like a great big, splendid boy.”
They had enjoyed a bottle of wine together and talked about poetry—about Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Morris, Tennyson, and Browning. The old poet had let the young aesthete hold forth on the intentions of his school of art. When Wilde asked about Whitman’s poetic theories, the old man smiled and answered amiably, like the best of mentors. He had his private doubts about Aestheticism, but he was personally encouraging to Wilde. Whitman opened up about problems he was trying to solve in his own poetry—issues that included sensuality, which he thought essential and his critics thought obscene. Years later, Wilde amplified his appreciation for Whitman’s fresh, uninhibited idea of sexuality, calling it “the relation of the sexes, conceived in a natural, simple and healthy form.” That made it sound wholesome and pink-cheeked. In his own works Wilde tried to tell the unvarnished truth, as Whitman did, when he described his poetry as “the song of Sex, and Amativeness, and even Animality.”
Turning the conversation back to Wilde, Whitman was anxious to know whether this young aesthete was going to have the courage to do something new with his poetry and his art movement. Would he dare to question the age’s pieties? What revolutions did he have in store? The white-beard urged the smooth-faced aesthete to have the courage of his opinions. ”Are not you young fellows going to shove the established idols aside?” he asked, as a goad to Wilde’s revolutionary spirit. In the newspaper articles that inevitably followed this encounter, the poets endorsed each other. Whitman bragged that “Wilde had the good sense to take a great fancy to me.” The feeling was mutual. Wilde felt he had won Whitman’s seal of approval. Years later, he told a friend, “the kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips.”