Walt Whitman on Government

On May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, New York. Many believe that Whitman was America's greatest poet and that his Leaves of Grass is the most influential poetry volume in American literature.

According to the Columbia Encyclopedia, Whitman's poetry "celebrated the freedom and dignity of the individual." But that celebration was not limited to his poetry. It is also reflected in the all-but-overlooked prose he penned during an extensive career as a journalist and editor.

Anyone who writes of individual freedom must consider the role of government, and Whitman was no exception. His views were well expressed in two editorials he wrote for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle: "Duties of Government," which was published April 4, 1846, and "Government," which ran July 26, 1847.

It is only the novice in political economy who thinks it the duty of government to make its citizens happy. Government has no such office. To protect the weak and the minority from the impositions of the strong and the majority--to prevent any one from positively working to render the people unhappy, to do the labor not of an officious inter-meddler in the affairs of men, but of a prudent watchman who prevents outrage--these are rather the proper duties of a government.

Under the specious pretext of effecting "the happiness of the whole community," nearly all the wrongs and intrusions of government have been carried through. . . . Indeed, sensible men have long seen that "the best government is that which governs least." And we are surprised that the spirit of this maxim is not oftener and closer to the hearts of our domestic leaders. From "Government":

The recognized doctrine that the people are to be governed by some abstract power, apart from themselves, has not, even at this day in this country, lost its hold--nor that to any thing more than the government must the said people look for their well-doing and the prosperity of the state... this dogma is particularly inconvenient; because it makes a perpetual and fierce strife between those of opposing views, to get their notions and doctrines realized in the laws.

In plain truth, he wrote, "the people expect too much of the government." Under a proper organization (and even to a great extent as things are), the wealth and happiness of the citizens could hardly be touched by the government--could neither be retarded nor advanced. Men must be "masters of themselves," and not look to Presidents and legislative bodies for aid. In this wide and naturally rich country, the best government indeed is "that which governs least."

One point, however, must not be forgotten--ought to be put before the eyes of the people every day; and that is, although government can do little positive good to the people, it may do an immense deal of harm. The Democratic principle . . . would prevent all this harm. It would have no man's benefit achieved at the expense of his neighbors. It would have no one's rights infringed upon and that, after all, is pretty much the sum and substance of the prerogatives of government. How beautiful and harmonious a system! How it transcends all other codes, as the golden rule, in its brevity, transcends the ponderous tomes of the philosophic lore! While mere politicians, in their narrow minds, are sweating and fuming with their complicated statutes, this one single rule, rationally construed and applied, is enough to form the starting point of all that is necessary in government: to make no more laws than those useful for preventing a man or body of men from infringing on the rights of other men.

Seventy years after the Declaration of Independence, Walt Whitman still echoed the views of its author, Thomas Jefferson, on freedom and government's only essential role: defending that freedom.

As we mark his 183rd birthday, we should celebrate not only the free verse of his unique American poetry, but also the freedom that both inspired it and made it possible. And we should also spend a moment to ask how much of that freedom which allows each individual, as far as possible, to govern his or her own actions, persists today.

Constructing Walt Whitman:
The Critics Contend With the Good G(r)ay Poet

To read a text is always to construct it, but to an unusual degree Whitman's readers have gone beyond this commonplace by constructing the author, creating an amazing variety of Walt Whitmans in the process. From the beginning, when they were known as "Whitmaniacs," these readers have been as much caught up in Whitman the man as in his writings. (Of course, the poet himself urges this approach.) Consequently, they have created a series of authorial myths, often but not necessarily contradictory: Whitman the good g(r)ay poet, the nationalist, the moralist, the advocate of the family, the prophet, the crusader for liberty, the enemy of social injustice. It is not surprising that these conceptions of Whitman have had much to do with the desires of the mythmakers. Likewise, it is to be expected that nowhere have these interpreters been more active than in the highly charged, highly problematic area of Whitman's sexuality. Given the tendency of each generation of critics to believe that it has arrived at the final truth of a text or author (even though some, if not all, would deny that they make such a claim), it is well worth reviewing the many Whitmans and their architects.

I have chosen to limit this study to the reactions of Whitman's admirers for the simple reason that the opinions of his detractors have remained static. Early critics, like later ones, violently objected to Whitman's technique and subject matter. Among them was Henry James, who at the age of 22 wrote a vicious attack on Whitman, but later came to appreciate his work and to regret deeply the "little atrocity" that he "perpetrated (on W.W.) in the gross impudence of youth" (Allen Solitary Singer 578n). (For an interesting discussion of how James' change of heart paralleled the development of his own identity, see Savoy.) Many, many others, notably Secretary of the Interior James Harlan and Boston district attorney Oliver Stevens, have been content to dismiss the poet as simply a libertine or pervert (Reynolds 455, 540).

These same reactions are common enough today. Betsy Erkkila relates the case of a public service announcement dealing with Whitman's sexual orientation (in an attempt to offer support to lesbian and gay teenagers) that was refused by all six Philadelphia television stations, in two cases on the advice of the director of the Walt Whitman Poetry Center, who feared that the announcement would be "detrimental" to the Center's educational efforts. Leaves of Grass still appears on the usual lists of banned books, and anyone who has taught Whitman knows that both of the objections current in 1855 remain firmly entrenched: his poems are not really poems, and whatever they are, they are "dirty." As Léon Bazalgette, an early French biographer of Whitman, notes, "the vocabulary of insult is somewhat the same at all times and in all countries" (143).

Varied though they are in some ways, the responses of Whitman's admirers to his homosexuality are relatively simple to classify. Generally speaking, earlier readers have attempted to deny Whitman's homosexuality entirely, later critics have tended to accept a still-uncomfortable truth about the poet while minimizing its importance, and the most recent generation has, in Betsy Erkkila's words, rebelled against a "critical tradition that has insisted on silencing, spiritualizing, heterosexualizing, or marginalizing Whitman's sexual feelings for men" (153).

There are exceptions to this position. Homosexuality was coming into being as a distinct identity rather than a behavior during Whitman's time: in Foucault's words, "[t]he sodomite had been a temporary aberration. The homosexual was now a species" (qtd. in Reynolds 396). Robert K. Martin places Whitman at the center of this transformation, proposing that "prior to Whitman there were homosexual acts but no homosexuals" (Homosexual Tradition 51-52). Many who believed that they shared this new identity with Whitman embraced him--mon frère, mon semblable. One of these was Oscar Wilde, who after a visit to Camden boasted that "the kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips" (Ellmann 171). (Whitman later remarked that Wilde "had the good sense to take a fancy to me!" (Reynolds 540; Whitman's emphasis)).

More interesting still is the sense of kinship felt by John Addington Symonds, in response to whose repeated (and ever-more pointed) letters as to the precise nature of his "adhesiveness" Whitman invented the story of his six children, which reads in part,

"My life, young manhood, mid-age, times South, etc., have been jolly bodily, and doubtless open to criticism. Tho' unmarried I have had six children--two are dead--one living, Southern grandchild, fine boy, writes to me occasionally--circumstances (connected to their fortune and benefit) have separated me from intimate relations" (qtd. in Hollaway xlvii-xlviii).

Conversely, early homosexuals, as far as can be known, did not identify with Whitman (Reynolds 579) and some later scholars, such as F. O. Matthiessen and Newton Arvin, themselves homosexual, privately sympathized with Whitman's sexuality but publicly sought to diminish its importance. (See below for further discussion.)

Interestingly enough, in more recent times some of the strongest resistance to acknowledging Whitman's homosexuality has come from the Left. Gilbert Frey, a Brazilian communist argues that Whitman's "vibrant sense of life and community," which sometimes seems "homosexualism gone mad ... probably was bisexualism sublimated into fraternalism." Paul Jamati, a French communist, describes Whitman's homosexuality as "une contre-légende" created by those who would attack democracy by defaming its greatest poet-advocate. Maurice Mendelson, a Soviet biographer of Whitman, interprets the eroticism of his poetry as symbolic of equality and freedom, "an expression of his active protest against social injustice" (qtd. in Allen "Whitman Biography" 7). Mainstream criticism and biography have, however, tended to follow the pattern noted above. Whatever the time, place, and prevailing ideology, readers have created a Walt Whitman suited to it.

The most remarkable aspect of the work of earlier scholars is its strong sense of advocacy. This is not surprising: Whitman was widely and harshly attacked during his day and for decades after, and given the intense identification Whitman's readers felt with him, to many an assault on him was one upon themselves. Their defense generally took the form not only of an attempt to heterosexualize Whitman, but even to make him an advocate of the family. In fairness to the poet's defenders, it is true that Whitman himself supplied them with considerable "evidence." Not only is there the famous letter to Symonds; Whitman also resorted to more sophisticated dodges, such as heavily revising an early version of Calamus to disguise its autobiographical nature. (See below for further discussion.) As Martin observes:

The process of revision that has worked to make Whitman "safe"... began with Whitman himself.... Whitman was always crafty, playing with the limits of the sayable, retreating when he was found out..., and he worked hard to construct a public image for himself as that was based on both his role as the American national poet and his role as the "secret" gay poet. (Introduction Continuing Presence xxi)

It is these efforts on the poet's part that shaped the first generation of Whitman scholarship.

The first Whitman biography not written by a member of his circle was Henry Bryan Binns's 1905 A Life of Walt Whitman. Binns relies heavily on the Symonds letter to construct a "safe" Whitman, even elaborating upon it: based only upon "remarks that [Whitman] let fall from time to time in private conversation," Binns argues that while in New Orleans the poet

formed an intimate relationship with some woman of higher social rank than his own--a lady of the South where social rank is the first consideration--that she became the mother of his child, perhaps, in after years, of his children; and that he was prevented by some obstacle, presumably prejudice, from marriage or the acknowledgment of his paternity. (51)

However, even this account troubles Binns, so he concludes that Whitman's abandonment of this mistress and child(ren?) must have been her decision. After all, how else could Whitman have left her after allowing "the foulest of reproaches to blacken that whitest of all reputations, a Southern lady's virtue?"(53).

Binns does not rest his case entirely on the letter to Symonds. He also cites "Children of Adam," arguing that Whitman's attitude in this poem toward the begetting of children "is only possible to a man who has known true love, and has lived a chaste and temperate life" (159). And, Binns, like many before and after, desexualizes Calamus, viewing it as a celebration of comradeship quite free of any sort of "pathological" shading, in the terminology of the time.

No early critic/biographer one goes to greater lengths to "reform" Whitman than does Basil de Selincourt, author of Walt Whitman: A Critical Study (1914). De Selincourt's very writing style is itself a key part of his argument, heightening one's awareness of his great discomfort and his strong desire to put its source to rest. Always delicate, De Selincourt refuses even to name directly the charge against which he seeks to defend Whitman. In Calamus, he asserts, Whitman

advocates 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; emphasis added).

Only the provincial, then, could wonder as to Whitman's 'adhesiveness.' However, this critic, unlike others, does not base his conclusions upon the Symonds letter but rather on a careful and decorous reading of Whitman's work.

De Selincourt does, however, gather his courage and address directly the question on many readers' minds by examining "Earth My Likeness" which, he asserts, is "the only passage in Leaves of Grass that can be construed as an allusion to sodomy." After examining the poem:

Earth my likeness,
Though you look so impassive, ample, and spheric there,
I suspect that is not all;
I now suspect that there is something fierce in you eligible
to burst forth,
For an athlete is enamour'd of me, and I of him,
But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me
eligible to burst forth,
I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs.

he interprets it as a condemnation of a particular "impulse" (206-07). Once we free Calamus "from the breath of this suspicion" we may approach it properly as:

the celebration of the ideal relationship of soul to soul.... [I]n order to divest this relationship of sexual associations, Whitman confines his hymns of it to the love of one man for another. It is equally of course the relation of woman to woman, or of man to woman in the rare cases in which the difference of sex becomes irrelevant. (207, 210)

Though he seems to have rendered Calamus safe enough, De Selincourt goes further, manufacturing for Whitman a wife. His case is marked by both creativity and desperation:

The gentleness, the desolation, the note of irretrievable blind searching for an object once so close and dear, these and other touches in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" point to a core of personal experience ... for which a biographer must find some explanation. And the simplest, perhaps the only adequate, explanation is that it is the song virtually of a husband mourning for the death of one who was in all but name his wife. (23-24)

Not only did Whitman take a wife "in all but name," he was also a great family man, a prophetic Ward Cleaver:

Throughout his writing upon sex, the procreative function is insisted upon; his lovers--'lovers' is not quite the right word for them!--are parents; and we can see that no life finally commends itself to him or comes really within his purview except that of the family. (20)

Léon Bazalgette has little to add to the subject of Whitman's sexuality but demands mention because his biography, translated into English as Walt Whitman: The Man and his Work (1920), was highly influential in developing Whitman's following on the Continent. Bazalgette accepts Binns's theory of a New Orleans affair, yet in order to sustain the notion of a heterosexual Whitman he is forced to ignore Calamus, devoting to it, in a book of 355 pages, precisely one sentence: "In the fourth part [of the 1860 Leaves of Grass], Calamus, he published his thirst for impassioned comradeship, of the close affection of man to man, which tormented him to the verge of sorrow, and was indeed in him insatiable" (164).

Clara Barrus, author of Whitman and Burroughs, Comrades (1931), makes the defense of Whitman her primary mission, declaring in her introduction her intention to offer "abundant evidence ... that Whitman held women in the highest regard, never tolerating light or lewd talk about them, and setting his face sternly against all violation of the sanctity of the family" (xxviii). (An argument that calls to mind a drill sergeant inquiring of a new recruit, "You like girls, don't you?") Yet Barrus is uncomfortable with the story of Whitman's paternity, knowing it to be highly unlikely, and so dismisses the matter by arguing that Whitman obviously did not know that homosexuals are capable of reproduction and thus saw the letter Whitman's attempt to deflect Symonds's offensive suggestions (338). This argument allows Barrus to reject the story of the children without having to consider why Whitman might have wished to offer it.

Clearly, the earliest sympathetic biographers and critics of Whitman were driven to render him socially acceptable, a compulsion springing, perhaps, not only from loyalty but also from a desire for self-protection, often taking the form of wishful thinking and a florid celebration whose tone comes straight from medieval hagiography. Yet the modern reader must not condemn them too readily. The clear homophobia of their time rendered impossible a frank appraisal of Whitman, and it was necessary to create a hetero- or non-sexual Whitman in order for there to occur any broader discussion of his works at all: consider the decades of critical oblivion to which Wilde's works have been consigned since his disgrace. (As Camille Paglia observes, in typically direct style, even today a male scholar of Wilde risks being "judged both queer and frivolous" (512)). For all the negatives involved in early Whitman scholarship, Binns, Barrus, De Selincourt and others did begin the process of admitting Whitman to the canon.

The second generation of Whitman scholars tended, as new evidence on Whitman and new information on human sexuality came to light, to acknowledge his sexuality while minimizing its importance. An important example is Newton Arvin's Whitman (1938). Arvin's personal life was a tortured one; he was dismissed from his position at Smith College when a raid on his home turned up homosexual pornography, thus beginning the decline which ended in his death (see Clarke). In light of these facts, his discussion of Calamus and Whitman's sexuality is a drama of conflicting emotions. Arvin confronts the matter directly:

The fact of Whitman's homosexuality is one that cannot be denied by any informed and candid reader of his Calamus poems, of his published letters, and of accounts by unbiased acquaintances; after a certain point the fact stares one unanswerably in the face. (274)

Yet Arvin immediately begins backtracking, arguing that the poems express only a "tendency" of Whitman's. They are of interest but represent "an experience that quite certainly neither can nor ought to be important and decisive for the mass of man." This side of Calamus will come to attract less attention, not more, in a "healthy and integrated society." What is more, the Calamus poems do "indicate ... that Whitman's political outlook was distorted in at least one way by his emotional organization" (274). Just as quickly, however, Arvin begins his defense:

...what really interests us in Whitman is ... that, unlike the vast majority of inverts, even those creatively gifted, he chose to translate and sublimate his strange, anomalous emotional experience into a political, a constructive, a democratic program. (275)

Arvin compares Leaves of Grass to Plato's Republic, a work also valued despite its homosexual undercurrents, and even declares that "there is, so to say, a harmless, wholesome, sane 'homosexuality' that pervades normal humanity as the mostly powerless bacilli of tuberculosis appear in the healthiest of lungs" (276-77). The simile is a strange one, revealing even in the midst of justification a lingering association with pathology. Arvin's sense of conflict is clear.

In a similar, but less bold, vein is Hugh I'Anson Fausset's Walt Whitman: Poet of Democracy (1942). Fausset asserts that "sexuality to any conscious degree is an abnormal element in the friendship of men" and freely acknowledges that "there is no doubt that there was an element of such perversity in Whitman's gospel of 'manly attachment'" (150). Still, however, Fausset attempts to defend Whitman from his own conclusion, arguing that "throughout his life he expressed his ideal of 'intense and loving comradeship' in countless contexts in which the dictating impulse was simple human affection" (152). In other words, Whitman was indeed to some degree homosexual, but we must not make too much of it. Thus Fausset treats Whitman's sexuality as a harmless eccentricity, not unlike a passion for matchbook collecting.

Though coexistent with the newer habit of admitting Whitman's homosexuality, the old urge to spiritualize Whitman's eroticism remained powerful in this period, as attested by Henry Seidel Canby's Walt Whitman: An American (1943). For example, Canby freely acknowledges that Whitman was not heterosexual, at least in the usual sense, yet still hedges, dismissing Whitman's attachments to Peter Doyle and others as "the outpourings of a thwarted paternalism" and rejecting outright the idea "that Walt Whitman, the I, was actively homosexual" (198). Instead, Canby asserts,

Whitman was ... 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. [Whitman's] eroticism ... was sublimated into a fatherly love of innumerable 'sons,' and into magnificent poems of the comradeship of true democracy. (201-02)

The term "intermediate" is an unusual one, and in context apparently means bisexual. Whitman's emotions, then, were real, but were expressed as an entirely wholesome and safe tribute to "the comradeship of true democracy."

F. O. Matthiessen's influential American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) adds nothing to the discussion of Whitman's sexuality; its purely formalist approach considers Leaves of Grass a "language experiment" with roots in oratory, opera, and the ocean (517). However, we do know that Matthiessen did discuss the subject of Whitman's homosexuality privately in letters to his lover, Russell Cheyney (Erkkila 168n).

The most prominent Whitman scholar of this post-war period was Gay Wilson Allen, whose The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman (1955), though in many ways a vast improvement over the very early biographies, does little more than they to confront the nature of Whitman's sexuality. At this stage in his career Allen is remarkably bashful about the whole matter, though his essay "Whitman Biography in 1992" does seem to recognize Whitman's sexuality. In 1955 Allen does grant that "it is obvious ... that the sexual theme that most interested Whitman in 1857 was homoeroticism" yet he immediately qualifies this seemingly innocuous remark by adding "though it is by no means certain that he yet realized this fact" (218). When confronted with the relationship between Whitman and Peter Doyle, Allen makes a careful study of the dates of their correspondence (particularly the letter in which Doyle said that he shared Whitman's feelings), last meeting, and Whitman's departure from Washington, and concludes that "whatever the psychologist may think of this abnormally strong affection of the two men for each other, these dates make actual perversion seem unlikely" (423-24). Allen explains away the homoerotic in Calamus through a slight variation on an older theme: mysticism. Whitman, he says, is simply following in the tradition of earlier artists and mystics by making "sex a symbol of divinity or the potency of nature" (226).

Approaching the end of this period, John Snyder's The Dear Love of Man: Tragic and Lyric Communion in Walt Whitman (1975) also acknowledges Whitman's love for other men, yet interprets it, in a passage remarkably tortured even by current standards of academic prose, as a metaphor for the ultimate impossibility of communion:

If life is love and love is alienated and impermanent man's exacerbated sense of the impossibility of finally successful communion in a world of time and space, then homosexuality is the perfect paradigm for a new kind of tragic communion based on the very impossibility of any communion at all. Heterosexual love brings the two into one in the production of the third. Homosexual love puts the one starkly against the other with no hope of a third. (152)

Snyder's reading requires us to ignore the celebratory nature of so many of Whitman's treatments of nonprocreative sexuality. Though Whitman's journals, and indeed some of his poems do reveal some sense of the anguish caused by his excessive "adhesiveness," and though he did tend to "retreat when he was found out," as Martin phrases it, Whitman's work as a whole renders questionable any assertion that he viewed homosexuality, or sexuality in general, as any form of alienation, much less an exacerbated one.

Yet what is notable here is that Snyder does not attempt to minimize Whitman's homosexuality in the usual sense; he assigns to it a position of great prominence regarding Whitman's work while maintaining the earlier tendency to subject it to a sort of moral censure. Thus one might postulate Snyder's Whitman as an intermediate; while making the ritual expressions of disapproval, Snyder nonetheless moves the issue of Whitman's sexuality to the center.

Clearly, the prevailing trend during this middle period of Whitman studies--between the age of the "Whitmaniacs" and the Gay Studies movement beginning in the late 1970s--was to acknowledge Whitman's sexuality while seeking to mysticize, minimize, or pathologize it. Once again, the reader's desire, resulting as it does from social pressure, creates a Whitman appropriate to the reader's day. In this middle period, when the homosexual identity was more fully developed yet still quite dangerous, the Whitman most suited for public discussion was a homosexual who was somehow not affected by it.

Just as earlier scholars sought to deny or dismiss Whitman's homosexuality, today's critics generally center it in their discussion of his life and work. Martin asserts, and a reading of relevant texts demonstrates, that after Whitman was admitted to "the American canon ... he was then subject to a homophobic critical examination that diluted or frankly eliminated the homosexual content of his work" (Introduction xix). The result of this process has been to "permit critiques of Whitman that might be answered, or at least diminished in intensity, if they were placed in the context of his sexuality" (xvii). Martin was among the first to place Whitman's works in precisely this context; his The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979) marks, among other things, the beginning of a new openness in approaches to Whitman. Martin's analyses of "Song of Myself" and Calamus are frankly, even aggressively, sexual, with little talk of mystical communion. He sees Section 11 of "Song of Myself" ("Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore..."), for example, as "a clear defense of the anonymous sexual encounter" (19). In a somewhat labored reading, Martin interprets the final line, "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 nineteenth-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)

A matter of special controversy in the current age, as before, has been the apparent duality of Whitman's carefully cultivated image. Just as earlier critics have assumed a distinction between the poet's private and public personae, so too have more recent ones. Alan Helms, in his "Whitman's 'Live Oak with Moss'" (1992) proposes that Whitman's reordering and enlarging of the "Live Oak with Moss" sequence into Calamus was an attempt to blur a clearly autobiographical narrative of a homosexual affair, and part of Whitman's "lifelong effort to mute and suppress the evidence of homosexuality in his work" (198). According to Helms, Whitman was keenly aware of the conflict in his aim to be both the American poet and a gay poet (198; see also Dougherty 15n).

Erkkila, however, has strong reservations about recent Whitman criticism, particularly its preservation of this "distinction between Whitman the private poet and Whitman the poet of democracy," a division "that unduly privatizes and totalizes Whitman's sexual feeling for men" (153). Making a connection only hinted at by previous critics (and later developed more fully by David S. Reynolds), Erkkila argues that Whitman's view of adhesiveness is an integral part of his conception of democracy, a means by which, in Whitman's words, "the United States of the future ... are to be most effectively welded together" (155). Consequently, Whitman's sexuality is not, as many recent critics say, a "single, transhistorical monolith" but instead a "complex, multiply located, and historically imbedded sexual, social, and discursive phenomenon" (167). Thus, the usual distinction between private gay poet and public democratic poet is false: "the homosexual poet and the American republic refuse any neat division; they intersect, flow into each other, and continually break bounds" (168).

David S. Reynolds's Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (1995) brings us to the present, and with its amazing scope and depth deserves a far more detailed examination than is possible in an essay of this sort. Given the cyclical nature of Whitman criticism in its reactions to prevailing attitudes, it is not surprising that Reynolds's Whitman reflects growing public acceptance of homosexuality. This Whitman was, in our terms, (an important distinction, given Reynolds's efforts at historical contextualization), a homosexual, yet his sexuality was an ambiguous, pre-Freudian one that did comprise an important element of his work but did not dominate it. Just as Jerry Seinfeld denies an accusation of homosexuality with the qualifier, "not that there's anything wrong with that," so, too, does Reynolds avoid both advocacy and censure.

Whitman's response to Symonds sets the tone for Reynolds's discussion of the poet's sexuality. Pathetic though Whitman's denial might seem with the benefit a century of sexual research and theorizing (not to mention hindsight), "there is reason to heed his warning to Symonds that his poetry about male love must be read only 'within its own atmosphere and essential character'" (198). What is that "atmosphere and essential character"? In "Walt Whitman's America," before Freud and Havelock Ellis, Reynolds reminds us, "[p]assionate intimacy between people of the same sex was common.... The lack of clear sexual categories (homo-, hetero, bi-) made same-sex affection unself-conscious and widespread" (391). Such now-common (and salacious) expressions as "sleep with," "lover," and "make love to" simply did not have sexual connotations in Whitman's time (391-392). Indeed, intimacy between same-sex friends bore the imprimatur of such then-influential ideas as romantic friendship (Reynolds 391) and phrenology (398-399).

This unself-consciousness resulted in physical relations between friends that might astonish the modern reader. A case in point is that of two Connecticut College students, Albert Dodd and Anthony Halsey. As Dodd wrote: "Often too [Anthony] shared my pillow--or I his, and then how sweet to sleep with him, to hold his beloved form in my embrace, to have my arms around his neck, to imprint his face with sweet kisses" (393). Even genital contact between friends did take place, and was discussed freely, as we see in an exchange of letters between James H. Hammond and Thomas Withers, in which Withers asked Hammond whether "he had recently had 'the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole--the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling?'" and "humorously recalls feeling defenseless before 'the crushing force' of Hammond's 'Battering Ram'" (394).

There is other evidence for the apparent acceptance of even genital contact between members of the same sex. Reynolds cites the work of Michael Lynch, who examined as many as 75,000 indictments from New York dating from 1796 to 1893 and found only about 30 regarding sodomy, all involving "force, violence, injury, or pain." Only two of these cases resulted in convictions. In a further examination of news accounts and court papers Lynch found "no suggestions that sodomy is a threat to state or family..." (394-395). Given the 1882 editing of Leave of Grass to avoid an obscenity suit, in which even "A Dalliance of Eagles" was deleted but all but one poem from Calamus allowed to remain, Reynolds argues that "Whitman's America" was far more prudish about heterosexuality than same-sex eros (540).

Walt Whitman's age, then, viewed passionate friendships between members of the same sex as positive and normal. Regarding Whitman's work, then, we can only conclude that:

[w]hatever 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 underscored the healthiness of such love... [such as] the cult of romantic friendship, the phrenological notion of adhesiveness, and the idea of passional social bonding. (391)

Thus Reynold's Whitman heralds a sort of middle passage; while "[t]he notion some have of [Whitman] as a lonely voice crying out in a wilderness of homophobia is misleading" (391), it is likewise true that "critics...who try to prove Whitman was fundamentally heterosexual have little to stand on" (490).

It is clear that more recent scholars acknowledge Whitman's homosexuality and even center it in their analyses of his work. One can reasonably object that just as earlier critics sought to conceal or minimize Whitman's sexuality with talk of comradeship and mysticism, many later critics have been inclined to ignore these possibilities; some of their discussions, particularly Martin's, read like catalogs of sex acts. Perhaps this is a weakness of the enterprise of criticism; we often tend to view literature as a set of "competing ubiquities" as one writer has it--everything is really this or everything is really that. Another possible criticism is that these readers apply an outmoded, dichotomized model of sexuality to Whitman, one that considers all same-sex feelings of eros the equivalent of physical acts, a criticism that Reynolds addresses without ever mentioning his opponents.

While current approaches to Whitman are certainly more faithful to the facts of his life and work than those preceding them, the question still remains whether they are the result of more accurate scholarship or are themselves constructs born of a more tolerant age. In my opinion it is both. More information on human sexuality and on Whitman himself truly has come to light in the century since the poet's death. Criticism most assuredly is a socially-imbedded act; the Whitmans of Martin and Reynolds are as much products of their time and place as those of Barrus and de Selincourt. As always seems to be the case when dealing with Whitman, ehtier/or propositions are of little use here. The next question, of course, is what sort of Whitman might emerge next. Given our past experience, we can expect that he will reflect social trends, making it difficult to predict how future readers will deal with Whitman's sexuality, beyond the most obvious speculation. Should the academy undergo a conservative backlash, we might see a return to Whitman the mystic. Should homosexuality continue to be a matter of little controversy in academic circles, we may well encounter more "moderate" readings along the lines of Reynolds's. These will examine Whitman's sexuality without the tone of advocacy typical of some critics, who were, after all, working in a time, not very long ago, when it was seen as necessary to "reclaim" a historical figure as part of the development of an identity, a step in Foucault's progression from "temporary aberration" to "species." This newer Whitman may be, like Reynolds's, a poet who was a homosexual, not a homosexual who happened to write poems. The only certainty is that there will be future Whitmans; though Whitman may well have failed in his hope to be the people's poet, his works will no doubt continue to interest a large circle of dedicated readers who will, like those before them, construct their own Walt Whitmans.

Works Cited

Allen, Gay Wilson. "Whitman Biography in 1992." Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays. Ed. Ed Folsom. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1994. 3-9.

---------The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. New York: Grove, 1955.

Arvin, Newton. Whitman. New York: Macmillan, 1938.

Barrus, Clara. Whitman and Burroughs, Comrades. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.

Bazalgette, Léon. Walt Whitman: The Man and his Work. tr. Ellen FitzGerald. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page Co., 1920.

Binns, Henry Bryan. A Life of Walt Whitman. Repr. of 1905 edition. New York: Haskell House, 1969.

Canby, Henry Seidel. Walt Whitman: An American. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943.

Clarke, Gerald. Capote : A Biography. New York : Simon and Schuster, 1988.

De Selincourt, Basil. Walt Whitman: A Critical Study. London: Martin Secker, 1914.

Dougherty, James. Walt Whitman and the Citizen's Eye. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1993.

Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Erkkila, Betsy. "Whitman and the Homosexual Republic." Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays. Ed. Ed Folsom. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1994. 153-71.

Fausset, Hugh I'Anson. Walt Whitman: Poet of Democracy. New Haven: Yale UP, 1942.

Helms, Alan. "Whitman's 'Live Oak with Moss.'" The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life. Ed. Robert K. Martin. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1992. 185-205.

Hollaway, Emory. Biographical Note. The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. Vol. I. New York: Peter Smith, 1932. xxiii-lx.

Martin, Robert K. Introduction. The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life. Ed. Robert K. Martin. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1992. xi-xxiii.

---------The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. Austin: U of Texas P, 1979. Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. London: Oxford UP, 1941.

Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Snyder, John. The Dear Love of Man: Tragic and Lyric Communion in Walt Whitman. The Hague: Mouton, 1975.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1900 Edition. http://www.cc.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/ whitman/whit176.html.

Last Modified May 10, 1997

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