Especially early in his career, Robert Indiana thought of himself primarily as a poet and a painter, and in the early 1960s, he created a body of work inspired by the work of nineteenth-century American literary figures including Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Writers like Melville and Whitman resonated with Indiana on multiple levels: for their groundbreaking expressions of the American experience but also for their paeans to seafaring, which were widely read within the queer community as coded investigations of same-sex desire.