Sex & Sexuality In The Poetry Of Walt Whitman
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“I have not gaind acceptance of my own time,
but have fallen back on fond dreams of the future”
(by Walt Whitman, qtd. in Miller, Sex and Sexuality)
SEX AND SEXUALITY IN THE POETRY OF WALT WHITMAN
Perhaps, in the following essay I put a quart into a pint pot, because I intend to puzzle out, or rather, find and give a deeper insight into Walt Whitmans sexuality that is still a question on agenda. There are readers and critics who state that it is a shame to humble his poetry to this level, but I think that he was homosexual in his era the topic cannot be left untouched, because therefore this factor was very influential on his everyday life, thinking and hence on his poetry, too.
His only volume, Leaves of Grass – that was published several times – was first published at in 1855 Whitmans expense.
As it can be easily foretold, there was and there continues a huge debate about Whitmans homosexuality, or to say, his sexual identity. There are readers who resist to accept and affirm that he was homosexual or even bisexual. The attitudes toward his sexuality has changed and supposedly are changing, and there are critics, who tinge their opinions and for example Gay Wilson Allen – who wrote a biography about Walt Whitman applying the title “The Solitary Singer” – says that his “sexual emotions were stronger for men than for women”(qtd in Miller, ex and Sexuality) . Above this, according to other critics, Whitman himself wrote openly about this issue in his letters and prefaces; he sought the ways of expressing it, to communicate his homosexuality to his readers. It was most common in case of Peter Doyle who was ex-Confederate soldier who became Whitmans intimate friend till Whitmans death. Whitman wrote to Peter Doyle often when on leave from his Washington civil service work, as in this August 21, 1869. Whitman discusses his friends health problems and refers to a misunderstanding between them but includes an array of affectionate terms. In a notebook a year later, Whitman replaced Doyles initials with the code 16.4 and the barely legible “him” with “her” in vowing to fight his overly close “adhesiveness” in this friendship. This entry has been interpreted as the best proof of Whitmans homosexual inclinations.
In my view, there exists not only one possible reading and understanding of someones poetry, and through reading we also construct the text, that is to say, we construct a meaning that will reflect our background and attitudes as well. So according to readers Whitman can be the nationalist, the moralist, the advocate of the family, the prophet, the crusader for liberty, the enemy of social injustice and even the gay poet. Miller deals with the major critics of Walt Whitman. According to him, Robert K. Martin explains it in his “The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry” (1979), it seems that homosexuals tend to understand Whitmans poetry as a homosexual poetry more often than those do who avow themselves heterosexual Respectively we could take stock of one of those critics, namely Newton Arvin, who acknowledged and did not minimize the importance of Whitmans homosexuality. Arvin himself fought with similar problems as Whitman did, and shared similar tortured life. He was dismissed from his position because there were homosexual pornographic movies found in his home. After this scandal, he began to quickly relapse, and finally he died. He was who said the following: “The fact of Whitmans 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.”
In this essay my own viewpoint is that it is not impossible to assume that Walt Whitman was not only outstanding and different from the crowds as regards his poetical talent, and the techniques he introduced but in a sense that he was also a forerunner of contemporary ideas and attitudes. We do not have to go so far only accept and bear in our minds that he war a real advocate of women and believed that men and women are equal, and therefore they are not so separate in their sexuality. So the concepts of “men” and “women” are not exclusive but inclusive ones.
As I pointed it before, in the first edition of Leaves of Grass the themes of sex and sexuality appeared namely in the poems “Song of Myself”, “The Sleepers”, and “I Sing the Body Electric”. In 1856, two more poems were added; “Poem of Procreation” (now “A Woman Waits for Me”) and “Bunch Poem” (“Spontaneous Me”). In the 1860 edition, he collected those poems that are concerned with sexuality into the cluster “Enfans dAdam” (“Children of Adam”) and those that celebrate adhesiveness into “Calamus”. In particular the Calamus poems, written after a failed and very likely homosexual relationship, contain passages that were interpreted to represent the born of a gay man. The name of the poems alone would have sufficed to convey homosexual connotations, since the calamus plant is associated with Kalamos, a god in antique mythology, who was transformed with grief by the death of his lover, the male youth Karpos. In addition, the calamus plants central characteristic is a prominent central vein that is phallic in appearance.
Now I intend to turn my attention to concrete examples from Walt Whitmans poetry to provide some evidence of that sexuality played an important role in his poetry, and there are possible readings to find traces for that. Of course, we cannot only rely on selected and isolated passages or parts of his life-work, but on the other hand, there are crucial tropes that are so significant and at the same time generic, and that I find sufficient to depict and represent Whitmans whole work.
First, I would like to concentrate on the fifth section of Song of Myself. This section caused and causes lot of problems for Whitman and turned a lot of readers off, not only because its extremely overt sexuality but because it is sometimes incomprehensibly mystical. As most of the curriculums leave out this infamous part (and therefore constructing it as a taboo), if people do not go into the depths of Whitmans poetry, they will be misled. Here he focuses on the relations between body and soul:
Clear and sweet in