Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, two great figures of their age, never shook hands or spoke despite their often close proximity, which was made all the closer as a result of the poet volunteering as a nurse during the Civil War. From Jamie Stiehm at the New York Times’ Disunion blog, a passage about their “relationship”:

“Above all, Whitman studied the stars and waves of Lincoln’s mercurial character the way a great sculptor might gaze at his craggy countenance or larger-than-life hands. The poet came to know the routes of the president’s carriage. When he saw it passing by, he stood with hat in hand. He kept a lookout in the summer months, when Lincoln rode daily along Seventh Street out to a peaceful family retreat at the Soldiers Home, three miles away from crush of his callers. Whitman was once inside the executive mansion to see John Hay, the president’s secretary. He was standing close to Lincoln, who was animatedly engaged in another conversation, but went on his way, loath to interrupt him.

As Whitman later recounted, he exchanged nods, bows and waves with Lincoln several times over a few years and saw the president shake hundreds, if not thousands, of hands at a party. But not Whitman’s. In one of American history’s closest calls, the two never spoke a word to each other. (Though it is believed that Lincoln, 10 years older, read some of the poet’s work aloud back in Springfield, Ill.)

Whitman nevertheless felt he got a good fix on Lincoln. ‘I love the president personally,’ he declared. Well he might, because years earlier he had imagined a bearded president from the prairie, the West who was ‘heroic, shrewd, fully informed.’ Lincoln was nothing if not a shrewd, strong outsider, which helped make him the one man alive capable of settling the old sectional divide sundering the nation.”