ived a licentious life, and who allowed his fine intellect to wallow in impure and abominable ideas. Whereas in reality Whitman’s life appears to have been remarkable for its manliness and cleanness; and his greatest aim was to give his fellow a helping hand in the direction of purity(30).This work was among the first defenders of Whitman's sexual material, the very issue that Whitman himself thought to be the most misunderstood aspect of his work. Trimble, however, while attempting to exonerate Whitman’s overt sexual references, limits his study only to the “Children of Adam” poems, never once mentioning “...two boys together clinging, one the other never leaving” or any of the “Calamus” poems for that matter. Amongst later critics in the second “era” of Whitman criticism, Henry Seidel Canby’s Walt Whitman: An American, published in 1941, does what many of his contemporaries do to Whitman’s homosexuality: spiritualize it, marginalize it, and delete it from the relevance it plays in “the comradeship of a true democracy” While Canby does indeed admit the fact that Whitman was homosexual, he reconfigures Whitman’s various well-known, male-male relationships as something transcending the sexual and cohering more to the concept of paternalism. In the aforementioned work, Canby describes Whitman as: an intermediate in sex...Such men are very common, especially among strong creative intellects, whose imaginative sympathies penetrate beyond sexual differences. They are very seldom homosexuals in the vulgar sense of the word...[His] eroticism...was sublimated into a fatherly love of innumerable ‘sons’ and into magnificent poems of the comradeship of true democracy(201-02). Along these same lines, James E. Miller, Jr. i...
