Many lines in the poems, many shadings in his life, indicate Whitman was disturbed over facets of this "manly love of comrades" he tried to purify and idealize. To Carpenter, he said:

"There is something in my nature furtive like an old hen. You see a hen wandering up and down a hedgerow, looking apparently quite unconcerned, but presently she finds a concealed spot, and furtively lays an egg, and comes away as though nothing had happened! This is how I felt in writing LEAVES OF GRASS . . I think there are truths which it is necessary to envelop or wrap up."

Symonds had demanded one truth unwrapped. The poet had refused.

NO DAINTY, DOLCE AFFETUOSO 1:

The most ensnarled question regarding Whitman's character concerns his masculinity. Examining him, we see that there is much unclear about masculinity itself. Highly assertive maleness often cloaks repressed homosexuality.

He seems to have discovered his homo-sexuality late, if indeed he ever understood it. But he made no connection between effeminacy and manly love. Biographers differ on the degree of womanishness in him. Friends described him robust, virile, swaggering in youth, manly gentle in age. Enemies not uncommonly charged his “manliness" was a literary pose, that he wore silk underthings, perfumed himself, etc. He seems to have been less masculine than he wished to be thought. This however, is common among homo-sexuals, and not a matter of dishonesty. It is natural to a class of homo-sexuals to over-assert the degree of maleness in their psyche, while another class caricatures the female. In both, wishful thinking appears the motive.

Malcolm Cowley borrows a line from Proust-“Their ideal is manly because their temperament is feminine,” — and continues, "He praised male vigor and ruggedness like a devoted wife or like a lover celebrating the beauty of his mistress not as qualities he possessed himself, but as those

he sexually admired." This is somewhat oversimplified, as if Cowley felt impelled to prove homo-sexuality identical with unmanliness.

That Whitman was narcisistic is fully evidenced by frequent sensual descriptions of his own body.