n his chapter “'Calamus': The Leaf and the Root," of his 1957 publication, A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass, makes no reference at all to Whitman’s homosexuality, contextualizing the abundant references to male-male intimacies as a mere “token of a spiritual relationship”(56). He states, “[s]urely the innocence of such behavior on the conscious level cannot be questioned. One can but conclude, from the available evidence, that the love celebrated in “Calamus” had a genuinely personal and pure meaning for Whitman and that he advocated it for a serious social end--democracy”(56-7), thrusting aside and reducing in one sentence the many deeper sexual implications that are irrevocably present in the “Calamus” chapter of Leaves of Grass. Modern critics, however, especially in the past decade or so, have done their best to answer this ceaseless desire to suppress and distort the many homoerotic aspects of Whitman’s poetry with a fervent concentration upon Whitman's homosexuality as the foremost influence upon his work.. Robert Martin in his 1979 introduction to The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life After the Life claims that once Whitman was admitted into the American Canon, “he was then subject to a homophobic critical examination that diluted or frankly eliminated the homosexual content of his work”(xix). Martin continues in his The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry with open and often frank sexual analyses. He interprets the final line of Section 11 of Song of Myself, “they do not think whom they souse with spray,” as A fantasy of mass fellatio, as all twenty-eight men apparently climax and shower the sky, and their sexual partners, with sperm...Against 19th century medical theories of the conservation of energy through the withholding of sperm, Whitman proposes a radical redistribution...
