THE QUESTION

In 1872, John Addington Symonds, the famed English critic and biographer, and a self-avowed Whitman disciple, wrote to the poet inquiring if the Calamus poems really meant what they appeared to mean. For years Whitman ignored the question, remaining the while on good terms with Symonds, an admitted homosexual. In 1890, Whitman finally replied. Symonds published only a portion of the reply, and failed to publish the text of his own request.

About the question on CALAMUS, etc., they quite daze me. LEAVES OF GRASS to be rightly construed by and within its own atmosphere and essential character-all its pages and pieces so coming strictly under. That the CALAMUS part has ever allowed the possibility of such construction as mentioned is terrible. I am fain to hope that the pages themselves are not to be even mentioned for such gratuitous and quite at the same time undreamed and unwished possibility of morbid inference which are disavowed by me and seem damnable. "... My life, young manhood, mid-age, times South, etc., have been jolly bodily, and doubtless open to criticism. Though unmarried I have had six children-two are dead-one living Southern grandchild, fine boy, writes to me occasionallycircumstances (connected with their fortune and benefit) have separated me from intimate relations."

Symonds had been working on his little-known Studies in Sexual Inversion, in which he seems to have taken at face value the denial, so far as any imputation is concerned that Whitman consciously dealt with homosexuality.

But Horace Traubel, a painstaking Whitman biographer and the poet's longtime friend, says Whitman had frequently discussed Symond's often repeated inquiry. According to Traubel, the poet, while expressing warm regard for Symonds, had fluctuated between amusement and annoyance at the following Symonds' request:

"What the love of man for man has been in the past, I think I know. What it is here now, I also know alas! What you say it can and should be I dimly discern in your poems. But this hardly satisfies me so desirous am I of learning what you teach. Some day, perhaps, in some form, I know not what, but in your own chosen form, you will tell me more about the Love of Friends. Till then I wait.'

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