Whitman in Love

Whitman in Love, written and performed by John Kevin Jones (A Christmas Carol at the Merchant’s House; Killing an Evening with Edgar Allan Poe), comes to the garden of the Merchant’s House Museum for a limited run - June 1 -13, 2027. American journalist, essayist, and pioneering poet Walt Whitman took nightly refuge at Pfaff's beer cellar just blocks from the Merchant's House on Broadway at Bleecker Street, a bohemian gathering place where he found community, inspiration, and the human intimacy that shaped his work. In the Museum’s jewel-box garden audiences will encounter the deeply personal love poetry of Walt Whitman in an idyllic theatrical setting that brings them face-to-face with one of the most powerful and revealing strands of his work. Whitman in Love draws from the poet’s “Live Oak, with Moss” — a sequence of poems composed in the 1850s and widely recognized as among the earliest sustained expressions of same-sex love in American literature. Later camouflaged in the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass, the poems trace an emotional arc of desire, tenderness, heartbreak, and resilience. Whitman in Love places these verses in conversation with contemporary voices and personal relationships that shaped Whitman’s inner life and artistic imagination. The result is a theatrical portrait of the poet not as a monument, but as a man: yearning, beloved, vulnerable, and transformed by love.