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Back to Subjects - Poetry

Whitman and Homosexuality

Whitman and Homosexuality 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 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 lived 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. in 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 of that energy through the release of sperm. To the “capitalism” of heterosexual intercourse(with its implications of male domination and ownership) Whitman opposes the “socialism” of nondirected sex(21). While all of these criticisms remain consistent with the times in which they were produced, they succumb solely to the attitude of the times, as sexuality changed in face and content; and none do measure accurately the force behind Whitman’s poetry. Even the contemporary critics who openly and justifiably discuss Whitman’s homosexuality, fail to draw a sturdy line between the concept of Whitman as homosexual and Whitman as poet. The suppression, marginalization and finally the full-blown analyses of the homosexual content of Whitman’s poetry has negated the crucial medium of homosexuality as an important influence upon Whitman’s poetry, yet one which by no means dominates it. Whitman challenged literary conventions, celebrated sex, internalized and universalized all people. His idea of homosexuality is and was, according to David S. Reynolds's Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, "never adequately placed in [its] 19th century context"(391). Whitman pushed the limits for everyone. And, regardless of the many different interpretations, when taken into account the various homoerotic writings of Whitman's time, it may justifiably be concluded that: whatever the nature of [Whitman's] physical relationships with [other men], most of the passages about same-sex love in his poems are not out of keeping with then-current theories and practices that underscore the healthiness of such love. Most important were the cult of romantic friendship, the phrenological notion of adhesiveness, and the idea of passionate social bonding(Reynolds, 391). The term “homosexual” was not coined until the early 1870's, nearly two decades after the first publication of Leaves of Grass. The word “Homosexualitat” first appeared in 1869 in a German magazine and was diagnosed a year later by Karl Westfal as an isolable medical condition. In response to this diagnosis, the historian Michael Foucault wrote, “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration. The homosexual was now a species”(Reynolds, 396). This does not mean however that male-male sex had never existed throughout history. There are in fact many noted examples of homosexual love throughout the course of time. What this does mean, however, is that same-sex love in Whitman’s America was viewed in an entirely different light and on completely different grounds. A man could sit on another man’s lap, whisper to him words of love and even share the same bed and not be considered deviant or “homosexual.” In Moby Dick, Queequeg and Ishmael share a bed and cuddle. David S. Reynold's “Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography discusses many other instances of male-male physical relationships in Whitman’s time. Albert Dodd, a Connecticut College student wrote of his relationship with fellow student Anthony Halsey: “Often too he shared my pillow--or I his...and then how sweet to sleep with him, to hold his beloved form in my embrace, to have his arms around my neck, to imprint upon his face with sweet kisses”(qtd in Reynolds, 393). Even contact, in the more explicit sexual sense, amidst friends did occur. In an exchange of letters between James H. Hammond and Thomas Withers, Withers asks Hammond whether he has “had recently had ‘the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with [his] long fleshen pole--the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling?’”(qtd in Reynolds, 394) This physical and sensual “comraderie” was apparently accepted. Reynolds also includes in his study a consensus done by Michael Lynch. Lynch examined upwards of 75,000 indictments from New York dating from 1796 to 1893. Of these, only 30 dealt with sodomy, all involving “force, violence, injury, or pain”; and of these 30 cases, only two resulted in convictions(394-95). To justify this love between men, society discussed this relationship in two ways: through the traditional concept of Christian Fraternization and the newly popular language of phrenology. In regards to the former, the concept of Brotherly love was based on the idea that one man should love another as Christ and his disciples loved each other. Through these affectionate bonds, lovers were not only joined to each other, but also to Christ. This model was also manifested in the Biblical relationship of David and Jonathan in the Old Testament. Whereupon hearing news of Jonathan’s death, David responds, “I grieve for you,/ My brother Jonathan,/ You were most dear to me,/ Your love was wonderful to me/ more than the love of women”(1Sam26). The second language used, phrenology, was a 1790's phenomenon, develop first in Vienna, which used the bumps on a person’s head to study or determine character. The major belief of many phrenologists was one that studied the brain as a web of small organs, each of which determined a different center of activity. One branch of phrenology broke down the human character into forty-two different faculties, some of which included parental love, combativeness, cautiousness and firmness. The two most important faculties used to study same-sex love, however, were Adhesiveness and Amativeness. The former according to the phrenologists was different from the procreative love of the latter and was one only studied in terms of male-male relationships as a manly friendship, manly almost always being stressed. Whitman, however, was able to use this 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,” “ethereal,” “the last athletic reality”(64). He goes on to purport this concept through an extended metaphor of the leaves of the calamus grass. According to him: Each of the attributes of the [calamus] plant suggests some aspect of the love of comrades: the size and toughness of the spears symbolize the depth and hardiness of such love: the distinctive odor suggests the spirituality of the attachments; growth in clusters suggests the two-fold results of the realization of such emotion: personal attachment and democracy; the seclusion of the plant indicates the rarity of such revolutionary friendships(71). While Whitman's ultimate goal may have been to attain this perfect spiritual love in which he feels a perfect democracy could easily be founded, he grapples with, and Miller fails to examine, sexual desire and consummation. Whitman fluctuated consistently between the complete satisfaction of the simple touch “holding [him] by the hand” and the “city of orgies” in which he participated and the sex of “we two boys together clinging.” And, while Miller’s extended metaphor of the calamus leaves may be sufficient if taken out of context of everything that Whitman ever wrote, it fails to work in the whole of Leaves of Grass, especially in the calamus chapter. Because, not only does Whitman refer to the blades as “the flag[s] of my disposition”, an easily discernible phallic symbol, the blades of the actual grass have long pointed leaves, yellow green spikes and sprawling tubers that resemble the penis in various stages of arousal. The blade, also, is named after the God Calamus who grieved by the river for the death of his boy lover who drowned. The Calamus section, while important as a section in its own right, needs to be taken in context with the ultimate push towards the ideal American democracy in Song of Myself to accurately read Whitman’s struggle with the whole of Leaves of Grass. The study of Whitman’s homosexuality in context of the tradition of American poetry is, as according to Martin, an “indication of the ways in which gay writers...have sought to explore the consequences of their homosexuality and to express them in their creative work”(The Continuing Presence, xv). Martin’s mission statement clearly involves this exploration and goes on to say that Whitman “so clearly defined his poetic mission as a consequence of his homosexuality”(xvi). But to take this a little further, Whitman’s Song of Myself is more a call for democracy not so much as in consequence of Whitman’s homosexuality, but in spite of this homosexuality that is wrestled with in the Calamus section. In her chapter, "Loving Walt Whitman and the Problems of America,"of Stealing the Language, Alicia Ostriker says that the primary thing that she noticed about Whitman's poetry was that he "permitted love...The degree and quantity and variety of love in Whitman are simply astonishing"(222). Ostriker touches upon the very subject that helps break Whitman's poetry away from being labeled specifically as "hetero" or "homo" and reaches most adequately into the realm of simply Whitman as poet. He says in section 5 of Song of Myself, "And that I know the spirit of God is the brother of my own,/ And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women/ my sisters and lovers/ And that a kelson of the creation is love"(28). Many, many other various types of love are celebrated throughout Leaves of Grass and through the combination of all of these, Whitman creates as the ruling factor of his democracy the boundless beauty and oneness of the spirit in which, "every atom of his blood, formed from this soil"(25) is inextricable from those of others. So "the bride [who] unrumples her white dress,"(37), "the prostitute [who] draggles her shawl"(37), the homosexual, the heterosexual, friends and lovers, all of these individuals, these opposite equals become one in the same as Whitman takes "of these one and all" and "weaves the song of [himself]"(38). Whitman furthers this democratic blending of these cultural dichotomies in section 24 of Song of Myself as he ascribes divinity to the scents of armpits and lifts up the station of copulation and movement of the bowels. He is pushing Emersonian individuality to its radical end, more or less saying that everything with in the self is to be known, enjoyed and praised, even the taboos. With a clear understanding of the self, he can clarify and transfigure "forbidden voices", "indecent voices", "voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd"(46). In this sense, Whitman challenges the sexual conventions of the literary times, not just those of homosexual sex, but sex in general. He is challenging the 19th century world of tea parties and tennis and bridge games in stuffy parlors, the overly proper and often prudish world in which he lived. But the taboo he addresses, he instantly vanquishes. The sex he creates is not essentially a physical sex or love, but a spiritual one. His sexual scenes are often presented in a discourse of physicality, but the subjects involved, the subjects copulating, are often the body and soul. He calls to the soul to "loafe with [him] in the grass, loose the stop from [his] throat,/ Not the music or rhyme [he] want[s], not custom or lecture, not even the best,/ Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice"(28). Here Whitman presents the "doubleness" that is consistent throughout his poetry, the physicality of a love that actually transcends the physical, which ultimately leads to the supreme knowledge of the self, what it means to be a complete individual. Ostriker had similar experiences with Whitman's poetry. She says that his poetry aroused [her] bodily, felt at once passive and active, derived from an unarguable consciousness of the vitality and beauty of the world and rested on a conviction that what [she] could feel, see, know in states of excited joy was real. The erotic was not "sex." It had nothing to do with conquest. It was a means of knowledge.(227) Even the homoerotic images of Whitman's work in such poems as "We Two Boys Together Clinging" and the "interpenetration" of "A Woman Waits for Me", suggest something more than merely a same-sex act of coitus. While they do evoke images of homosexual sex, these images concentrate more upon the relationship between the reader and writer. In the second poem mentioned, Whitman says "I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others as I and you interpenetrate now,/ I shall look for loving crops from birth, life, death, immortality, I plant so lovingly now"(87). Another "doubleness" appears here in Whitman's concept of the reader/writer relationship. The reader he feels must interpenetrate his text, while Whitman himself must penetrate the reader's mind, "plant his seed." He is invoking a sense of procreation that goes beyond the limits of homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality and builds a democracy based upon "the manly love of comrades" by expanding it beyond continental or physical borders in general. In his article, "Walt Whitman, Prophet of Gay Liberation," Richard Norton says that one of the reasons that Whitman was never accepted as the true poet of a democracy was the feeling that his proposed democracy is essentially "America's greatest embarrassment, because if what he says about democracy is true, then the American ideal of universal equality is inherently homosexual, and homosexual love is the physiological basis of democracy"(1). Yet, through the previously mentioned "universal" spirit and progressive statements in Leaves of Grass such as "he most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher"(47), Whitman becomes the ultimate "breeder" of American poetry, impregnating the minds of his reader with radical subjects and materials(sex and sexuality) that he portrays as the most universal and necessary subjects in poetry to ponder and diversify. The misunderstood Whitman has finally found a somewhat accurate representation of both himself as poet and himself as homosexual through David Reynolds. Reynolds has been able to find the middle ground between the two different contexts by juxtaposing both the life and writings of Whitman with the life and times of the community from which they came. He disproves the misleading notion that some have of Whitman "as a lonely voice crying out in a wilderness of homophobia"(391) and simultaneously rebuts the critics "who try to prove Whitman was fundamentally heterosexual"(490). But Reynolds is in the minority of critics who have accurately studied the two competing dichotomies of Whitman. Many recent critics do recognize and acknowledge Whitman's homosexuality but concentrate too fully upon it as the dominating factor of their analyses. And, again, the early Whitman scholars sought too hard to either ignore or marginalize it. While the more recent critics of Whitman may remain more faithful to the hard facts of Whitman's life and work, the questions of their findings as a result of an age more willing and wanting to discuss homosexuality, and sexuality in general, becomes relevant. Critics today know much more about sexuality and Whitman's life than those of previous eras. Whatever the case, as each age has progressed, Whitmaniacs have brought the reader newer and improved interpretations of Whitman. They still have yet to find an absolute Whitman because they still haven't been able to draw an absolute line between the competing entities of Whitman's poetry. And only when this line is drawn, when these two dichotomies are separated, can they become one. And, finally, this even newer and more improved Whitman may be absolute. Bibliography: Bibliography: Canby, Henry Seidel. Walt Whitman: An American. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943. De Selincourt, Basil. Walt Whitman: A Critical Study. London: Secker, 1914. Martin, Robert K. Introduction. The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life After the Life. Ed. Robert K. Martin. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992, xi-xxiii. ----------------. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. Miller, James E. A Critical Guide To Leaves of Grass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Norton, Richard. Walt Whitman, Prophet of Gay Liberation. Columbia: University of Columbia Press, 1993. Ostriker, Alicia. Stealing the Language. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995. Trimble, W.H. Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass: An Introduction. London: Secker, 1905. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Ed. Emory Holloway. New Jersey: Doubleday and Company, 1926.

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