FEBRUARY 1976

HIGH GEAR

WHITMAN THE GOOD GAY POET

by Mitchell Menigu

Walt Whitman, who lived through America's centennial, remains in its bicentennial year the most American of all the nation's writers.

In "Song of Myself," he is provoked to become a poet when speech from within him says sacrastically. "Wait you contain encugh, why don't you let it out then?"

Everything within American experience constitutes Whitman's material; thus to single out sexuality as one of his concerns is, in a sense, to limit the nature of the man and his work. Still, what aroused those of his contemporaries who read him and what has special relevance for those of us who today reach toward liberation from constricting attitudes toward sex are passages in his writing that express his acceptance and approval of all forms of sexual expression because they are inherent in man and Whitman accepts a man as he finds him.

His contemporaries were shocked by his explicit expression of heterosexual love, that he could sing the body electric." that he could announce himself, in "From Pent-up Aching Rivers," "...singing the phallus,/ Singing the song of procreation, Singing the need of superb children and therein superb grown people...," and, in celebrating the "act divine," speak of "the soft sliding of hands over me" and "the long sustain'd kiss upon the mouth or bosom." This procreative love which he labeled "amativeness" Whitman honored not only for itseif but for its function in peopling the growing democratic nation which he envisaged.

What might have seemed

more subject to controversy was the kind of love he called "adhesiveness." This term pointed to what he also sees as comradeship, the passionate relationship between two men. It is somewhat puzzling that the "Calamus" section of Leaves of Grass that contains the most concentrated presentation of "adhesive" love did not evoke so vocal a condemnation as the earlier published section, "Children of Adam," in which "amative" love is created most openly and frequently. One explanation may be the reluctance of readers to recognize in the poems what later in the century Lord Alfred Douglas was to call "the love that dare not speak its name."

Another explanation, which may be disturbing to gays today who are beginning to view any form of discretion about their sexual preference as a failure of nerve and betrayal of their cause, was Whitman's own reluctance to be open in acknowledging the nature of the "Calamus" poems and others that refer to the relationship that he most often terms "friendship" but also "manly attachment," "athletic love" and "the high towering love of comrades." Writing to John Addington Symonds, the English poet and critic, a known homosexual, who had expressed admiration for and interest in Leaves of Grass, Whitman damned those who called attention to "morbid inferences" that might be drawn from his idea of friendship. Whitman's protestation that "friendship" does not imply sexual consummation, arguing that he had several illegitimate children about the country (a claim that has never been substained in any way), could have carried little weight which Symonds who

was himself married and the father of several children.

Gays can, nevertheless, claim Whitman as one of their heroes and honor him as a poet whose work places homoerotic love

within the stream of the richness of American life. We can, recognizing that he lived in a period in which not only homosexuality but all sexuality was repressed, understand what motivated his denials in order to protect himself and assure the continued publication of his work. It is the poems that speak his thoughts more forcefully. Viewing the poems dealing with male friendship within the context of all of Leaves of Grass, a reader should find it hard to believe that he intended to be less comprehensive in accepting all that love between two men can involve than he was in accepting the rest of nature and society. Whitman's poetic method is accumulating specific details that explicitly convey his thoughts; it is unlikely that he intends to be abstruse in the imagery of friendship he uses.

Whitman does present

"athletic love" as a force for stimulating activity that will make America grow. In the Preface to the 1880 edition of Leaves of Grass, he says that it is by the "development of comradeship, the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows....and by what goes directly and indirectly along with it, that the United States of the future...are to be the most effectually welded together, intercalated, annealed into a living union".

One of the "Calamus" poems, "For You O Democracy," expresses a similar idea:

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,

I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, I will make divine magnetic lands,

With the love of comrades. With the lifelong love of comrades.

Granted that there is this almost platonic strain, the title of this section of Whitman's collection conveys a more explicit sexuality. The calamus is a wild iris, a plant that viewed with its root, stem, and leaves together presents a clear phallic image. Furthermore, there are passages in longer poems and whole short poems that deal with the sensual element in male friendships.

In one poem, he speaks to a companion:

Whoever you are holding me now in hand, Without one thing all will be useless,

I give you fair warning before you attempt me further, I am not what you supposed, but far different.

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Page 17

Who is he what would become my follower? Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?

Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,

With the comrade's longdwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss,

For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.

Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing, Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip, Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;

For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,

And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.

In another poem he tells "Recorders ages hence" to:

Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover,

whose happiest days were far away through fields, in woods, on hills,

he and another wandering hand in hand, they twain apart from other men,

who oft as he saunter'd the

streets curv'd with his arm the shoulder of

his friend, while the arm of his friend rested upon him also.

Again in "When I Heard at the Close of the Day," it is not that his "name had been receiv'd with plaudits in the capitol" that hrings a happy night. That requires something more personal:

For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night, In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,

And his arm lay lightly around my breast--and that night I was happy.

It is possible that the "certain person" was Peter Doyle, the young man he met late in the Civil War with whom Whitman had an attachment lasting several years. Early in their relationship Whitman doubted that his affection was returned. The openness of his affection can be seen in some of the terms of address he used in writing to Doyle and to some of the young men he had nursed during the war, phrases like "my darling." "dear comrade," "Dear Pete. dear son, my darling boy. my young and loving brother" and "dearest boy."

Although in his public statements, Whitman may have denied the full nature of his conception of "adhesiveness," his life and especially his writings make it clear that he is not only the poet who most fully expresses the American experience but one to whom gay Americans can turn to find their place in our national heritage celebrated.