his theory of phrenology to give a name to this love that had existed between men since Biblical times, this unnamed love “passing the love of women.” According to Robert Martin, Whitman took the faculty of Adhesiveness and "transformed it in an entirely new way"(The Homosexual Tradition, 34). Whitman, the poet, says in “Song of the Open Road”, “Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashioned, it is apropos”(123). In “Not Heaving from My Ribb’d Breast Only,” he calls adhesiveness the “pulse of his life”(100). Through these such injunctions, Whitman, according again to Martin, “gave that love the first name it had of its own”(35). But just as many critics, past and present, have been unable to find the true essence of homoerotic love in their discussion of Whitman’s sexuality and its bearing on the whole of his work, so too did Whitman struggle with the concept of adhesiveness. His goal was to make “the continent indissoluble. [He] will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, [he would] make divine magnetic lands, with the love of comrades, with the life-long love of comrades”(98). But this love, to enable the cities’ arms to reach “about each other’s necks,” needed to be a spiritual, and not a physical, love, a love that reaches its pinnacle when “the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason hold not, surround us and pervade us, then [he would be] charged with untold and untellable wisdom, [he would be] silent, [he would require] nothing further”(99). Miller saw these Calamus poems simply as a reflection of this comraderie as a simple celebration of the spiritual love of man for man. He says that “in [Children of Adam], emphasis is on the physical or sexual aspects of love, in [Calamus] on the spiritual...love of man for man is “disembodied,...
