While responses to Whitman's poetry have always been diverse in some ways, the interpretations of his homosexuality can be divided into three stages. In general terms, Whitman’s earliest critics tried to deny Whitman’s “deviance”; later critics accepted his homosexuality yet framed it as a marginalized truth; and contemporary critics have exploded in response to these years of oppression, outing Whitman in loud declarations of his intense feelings for men. In 1914, Basil de Selincourt in his work, Walt Whitman: A Critical Study, fights desperately against the homosexual innuendos and imagery in the “Calamus” poems, failing to name directly, in the process, that of which he is trying to prove Whitman guiltless. In his discussion of the Calamus poems, Selincourt says that Whitman: advocate[d] and to a certain extent himself practiced an affectionate demonstrativeness which is uncongenial to the Anglo-Saxon temperament and which those Englishmen who forget that there are two sides to the Channel find even shocking. The result...is that he is quite generally suspected of a particularly unpleasant kind of abnormality(204).And even though Selincourt addresses “Earth My Likeness” as “the only passage in Leaves of Grass that can be construed as an allusion to sodomy”(206), he reads the passage as Whitman’s own condemnation for this impulse “toward him [in which] there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible to burst forth”(101). W. H. Trimble does tackle the issue of sex in his 1905 Whitman study, Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass: An Introduction, saying: Whitman inserted, in many of his poems, lines and sentiments which, to the ordinary reader, are not only shocking and offensive, but are liable to produce the impression that they were written by a man who l...
