Home > Walt Whitman
2 Poetry
For many, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson stand as the two giants of 19th century American poetry. Whitman's poetry seems more quintessentially American; the poet exposed common America and spoke with a distinctly American voice, stemming from a distinct American consciousness. The power of Whitman's poetry seems to come from the spontaneous sharing of high emotion he presented. American poets in the 20th century (and now, the 21st) must come to terms with Whitman's voice, insofar as it essentially defined democratic America in poetic language. Whitman utilized creative repetition to produce a hypnotic quality that creates the force in his poetry, inspiring as it informs. Thus, his poetry is best read aloud to experience the full message. His poetic quality can be traced indirectly through religious or quasi religious speech and writings such as the Harlem Renaissance poet James Weldon Johnson. This is not to limit the man's influence; the beat poet Allen Ginsberg's reconciliation with Whitman is revealed in the former's poem, A Supermarket in California. The work of former United States Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, bears Whitman's unmistakable imprint as well.
Whitman's break with the past made his poetry a model for the French symbolists (who in turn influenced the surrealists) and "modern" poets such as Pound, Eliot, and Auden. The flavor of this power is exhibited in these lines from Leaves of Grass ( 1855), his most famous poem:
- I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
- I too walked the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it
- I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
- In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
- In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me,
- I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
- I too had received identity by my body,
- That I was, I knew was of my body - and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body.
3 Whitman and homosexuality
Another topic intertwined with Whitman's life and poetry is that of homosexuality and homoeroticism , ranging from his admiration for 19th century ideals of male friendship to outright masturbatory descriptions of the male body ("Song Of Myself"). This is in sharp contradiction to the outrage Whitman displayed when confronted about these messages, praising chastity and denouncing onanism. However, the modern scholarly opinion tends to be that these poems reflected Whitman's true feelings towards his sex and that he merely tried to cover up his feelings. For example, in "Once I Pass'd Through A Populous City" he changed the sex of the beloved from male to female prior to publication. He even went so far as to invent six illegitimate children to correct his public image.
During the American Civil War, the intense comradeship (which often turned sexual) at the front lines in Virginia, which were visited by Whitman in his capacity as a nurse, fueled his ideas about the convergence of homosexuality and democracy. In "Democratic Vistas", he begins to discriminate between amative (i.e. heterosexual) and adhesive (i.e. homosexual) love, taking cues from the pseudoscience of phrenology. Adhesive love is portrayed as a possible backbone of a better form of democracy, as a "counter-balance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy and for the spiritualization thereof".
In the 1970s, the gay liberation movement made Whitman one of their poster children, citing the homosexual and subversive content and comparing him to Jean Genet for his love of young working-class men ("We Two Boys Together Clinging"). In particular the " Calamus " poems, written after a failed and very likely homosexual relationship, contain passages that were interpreted to represent the Coming out of a gay man. The name of the poems alone would have sufficed to convey homosexual connotations to the ones in the know at the time, since the calamus plant is named after Calamus, a god in antique mythology whose young lover Carpus had died.
Despite evidence, for example given by fellow poets George Sylvester Viereck and Edward Carpenter, that Whitman not only had homosexual leanings but also practiced homosexual sex, this part of his personality is often omitted when his works are presented in the classroom.
