Hours sleepless, deep in the night

On the Conception of Live Oak, with Moss and the Birth of Calamus

 

We can never fully realize the extent to which a new relationship will impact our lives; even the most causal of friendships can change us.  The emotional relationships give the greatest effects; the time invested into the relationship, the range of emotions we experience, the life lessons we take away from it in the end, all contribute to us as a person in every way.  Though Walt Whitman was already a successful poet by the time he met Fred Vaughan around 1857, he had no way of realizing that his life and writing would forever be changed by this young man.

Few argue that Whitman is viewed as one of the finest poets admitted to the American literary canon, yet it is this same canon, the product of a homophobic academy[1] if you will, which for so long refused to acknowledge the fact that Whitman is also widely considered to be one of the first gay American poets.  When Whitman published the third edition of his seminal work Leaves of Grass in 1860, he included a new section titled Calamus, which was a direct result of a twelve-poem sequence he called Live Oak, with Moss.  The words written in this new section would serve as the seeds for what would ultimately grow into Whitmans greatest distinction, and he had Fred Vaughan to thank for it.

To understand the impact Vaughan had on Whitman and how Whitman came to be where he was when he met Vaughan, we must take a step back and look at Whitmans life beforehand.  The story of Whitmans visit to New Orleans in 1848 is as well known among Whitman scholars as Leaves of Grass itself is.  The full impact of this trip, however, is not quite as accepted.  Though the visit was relatively short in the scheme of things, its timing could not have been more profound: springtime, the few months he spent in the city, coincided with the sexually liberating Mardi Gras, which can be seen as the [awakening of] the first seeds of homoerotic poetry in Walt Whitman (Shively 13).

During this trip, Whitman wrote I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, which would eventually become a part of the Live Oak, with Moss sequence.  Why he chose this phrase as the title of the sequence can be seen in this very poem when he writes, I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,/ And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself/ it makes me think of manly love (quoted in Shively 13).  With these three lines, Whitman took his first real step out of the closet and the heart of Calamus took life.

As Whitman published his first two editions of Leaves of Grass, the first in 1855 and the second in 1856, he used his poetry to espouse the virtues of comradeship between men and the bonds that they shared.  The poem Whitman wrote in Louisiana had a dual effect on the poet; not only did it awaken his love for other men, but it also caused him to realize his desire and fuel his passion to become Americas greatest poet.  In the preface to his first edition, he claims that America, above all other nations, needs poets the most to proclaim the greatness of the nation, and he was the one to do it.  In his young, idealistic mind, Whitman felt that he could be Americas greatest poet and its first gay poet at the same time.  He felt that he could use his words to change the thinking of America, to make it a more accepting and tolerant place, to make it a nation of openness and equality for all.  His poems would be the vehicle for his passions, the affection that he felt could remake the fate of the country he loved (Groff and Berman 6).  Before publishing his third edition of Leaves of Grass in 1860 he would realize differently.

One must keep in mind the social context during which Whitman was writing and Calamus was born.  The third edition of Leaves of Grass was published only months before the outbreak of the Civil War.  In his own way, Whitman felt that his poems were powerful and persuasive enough to change the fate of the country and could possibly even prevent war.  When it became clear that war was inevitable, he retooled his poems in an effort to help heal and rebuild the young, angry country he loved so much.

When Whitman published his first and second editions of Leaves of Grass, the term homosexual was still over ten years away from being coined; Oscar Wilde was only an infant and fifty years away from his infamous prosecution and persecution.  Whitman was sitting on the precipice of radical changes in the definition of homosexuals not only externally [] by society, but internally [] by themselves (Aspiz 3).

To get around any public disagreement his poetry may evoke, Whitman used his own system of elaborate disguises to hide his true meaning from an unsuspecting public while at the same time leaving clues for his devotees to recognize.  Despite wanting to be Americas premier poet, Whitman was extremely private.  He did not want to use his poems as a vehicle to shove adhesiveness,[2] his code word for homosexual love, down the American throat, but rather do it in a more subtle way; In order to become undisguised and naked, he must first disguise himself (Helms, Hints 63).

When reading Whitmans poems, there is one aspect that relatively few readers pick up on, which happened to be one of his greatest tools for disguising his own adhesiveness; a vast majority of Whitmans poems are gender non-specific, thus making the subject matter androgynous.  When he does use a gender, it is typically the male gender in the context of friendship.  This neutrality lends itself to a variety of interpretations, depending upon who the reader is at the moment.  The beauty of his writing not only lies in this, but also in the order in which Whitman placed his poems.  Just as a reader thinks he or she has found a meaning behind his poems, it changes with the next poem.

That being said, how do we know that Whitmans homosexuality is not just another view that is just as plausible and debatable as his professing male friendship?  We, as readers, cannot read his poems with our modern mindset, but instead must take into consideration life one hundred and fifty years ago.  Meanings and terms have changed and evolved, but there are certain things which are said that have not changed; a century and a half later, the meaning is still just as clear as the day it was written.  Whitman writes: There is something fierce and terrible in me, eligible to burst forth / I dare not tell it on words not even in these songs (Helms, Hints 65).  The songs Whitman refers to are the poems which would ultimately become a part of Calamus.  What was so terrible within him that he could not speak it, even in his own poetry?  Simply put the one thing about him which would destroy any positive recognition he might achieve for his poetry and deny him the ability to become Americas greatest poet was his passionate love of other men.

Throughout Whitmans writing career, there was one dilemma which haunted him above and beyond all others: promote male-love, adhesiveness, yet balance it out with a heterosexual counter-part, thus hiding his own homosexuality.  Once he was able to do this, his poems about adhesiveness could be read as being about male friendship while readers like Whitman would understand their true nature and meaning.  The reception the first two editions of Leaves of Grass received helped him recognize the necessity of this.  A lot of people did not pay attention to the book when it first came out, but those who did considered it scandalous and filled with nothing but filth, and yet for as much as the critics condemned his work, they rarely, if at all, said what it was that they were condemning.  Since homosexual was not a term yet, they were merely referencing the unspeakable, that evil which had no name.

Enter Fred Vaughan.  Not only would Whitmans relationship with Vaughan change the face of his poetry, but it would ultimately provide Whitman with a lot of the answers he was looking for.  The circumstances of when and where Whitman met Fred Vaughan are not known, but scholars estimate that their relationship began shortly after the second edition of Leaves of Grass was published.  Like poets before him, Whitman used his poetry to express the emotions he felt as passions flared and love soared with Vaughan before eventually turning sour.  His range of emotions can be seen in two different lights.  In one sense, Whitman was a teacher and mentor to the young Vaughan, but more importantly, Whitman and Vaughan complimented one another as lovers; they shared a passion for nature and the outdoors and, by all accounts, were similar as individuals.  With these two roles combined, as lovers and mentor/pupil, Vaughan became what Whitman loved and vice-versa. 

Unfortunately, Whitman taught his pupil the notion of love between men a little too well.  Being young and adventurous, Vaughan followed his lust and eventually found other lovers, both men and women, much to Whitmans dismay.  In 1859, after their having lived together for three years, Vaughan moved out of Whitmans house and soon began living with another man.  Through all of its ups and downs, Whitmans relationship with Vaughan left an indelible impression on the poet.  One can easily argue that although Vaughan was not Whitmans first love, nor would he be his last, and certainly it would not be his longest relationship, Vaughan was Whitmans first and only true love.

During his three-year relationship with Vaughan, Whitman expressed his feelings in his poetry.  Scholars have found that it was during this period that he wrote some of his most passionate, yet heart-wrenching poems.  His Live Oak, with Moss sequence was born from this passion.  Prior to Vaughan, he had written as the collective I with regard to men and love.  When he penned the Live Oak sequence, Whitman took a turn, writing as a somewhat fictionalized, yet autobiographical, personal I, telling the story of the speakers love affair with another man, mirroring his own affair with Vaughan.  At their core, these poems were extremely personal and revealing, something the private Whitman was unaccustomed to.  As Byrne Fone points out, Whitman wrote himself into [his poetry] and out of it; it makes and unmakes him (Fone 7).

In order to grasp and comprehend the depth from which Whitman poured his emotions into the Live Oak sequence, we must examine each poem individually before seeing the group as a whole.  The Live Oak sequence is one which has not been examined at length by scholars; it was first discovered and published in 1953 by Fredson Bowers, but because it was printed in specialized publications and before the advent of photocopying machines, it did not gain wide circulation.  Additionally, the subject matter was considered far too taboo to be discussed in a classroom or among literary circles in the post-World War II era.  

In no way do I wish to undermine Alan Helms or Hershel Parkers individual studies of the Live Oak sequence, but rather my only desire is to provide readers with my own interpretation of these poems.  While both men readily acknowledge the validity and importance of Bowers texts, they have debated over which version of their own interpretations of the Live Oak sequence is the correct one.  To formulate my own criticism of these poems, I have used the poems as they appear on The Walt Whitman Archive (http://www.whitmanarchive.org/archive1/manuscripts/moss/oak.html), which has scanned the original manuscript pages that contain the Live Oak sequence onto its website.

In the first poem of the Live Oak sequence, the speaker tells us about his never-ending search for friendship, for love.  He opens the poem with references to his passion, comparing it to the swelling of heat and the tides as they move along shores.  As his passions rise and sink, he moves in and out of different areas, constantly searching for a new friend or lover.  His passion is comforting like the soft seeds of a flower, spreading far and wide in the wind, helpless to determine wherever it may land.

The speaker is fully aware of life.  He does not rush his search just as tides do not rush in and out, yet they never end their constant cycles.  Like comforting seeds, sweet perfumes, and clouds that send rain to cool the air, delicious and dry air, of the ripe summer, his passion and desire for friendship and love is carried in this same air, spread in all directions for anyone everyone to bask within. 

Our speaker uses the second poem to compare himself to an object firmly affixed in place.  Unlike the light seeds of his passion which can be carried to the farthest reaches by a simple gust of wind, he compares himself to a firm, sturdy tree.  The poem opens with him catching sight of a live-oak, most likely in a bayou or swamp, in Louisiana.  It stands alone, as he does in the world, with moss hanging off its branches, which can be seen as a metaphor for life and aging; as the live-oak continues to grow undisturbed in its solitude, the moss continues to grow on the tree, hanging from its branches as if it were clothing for the tree.  The tree grows alone in the swamp, glistening out with joyous leaves of dark green.  Like his own self, the tree is without a companion, but this does not keep it from glowing with its love.

Our speaker is curious as to how a tree so alone and without companion could bear such rich leaves.  Comparing himself to the tree, he states clearly that without his own friend or lover, he could not possibly be as joyous as this tree is.  With this stanza, the speaker has given us our first of several glimpses into his vulnerability.  Before leaving the tree, he plucks a twig, complete with moss, to take with him as a souvenir, and places it within sight of his room when he gets back. 

His placement of the twig segues into the next stanza where he discusses the twig and what it means to him.  He blatantly states to us that he does not need the twig to remind us of his friends, he thinks of barely anything else but them.  With the next two lines, however, he reaffirms for us what is at the heart of these poems male/male love: Yet it remains to me a curious token it makes me think of manly love.  Given the phallic representation of the twig, coming from the tree that makes him think of himself and the men he loves, rude, unbending, lusty, the line is quite erotic in nature.  

But what makes the twig a curious token?  In one sense because it seems odd that your souvenir of a trip would be a twig, something which only lasts as long as it lives, but in another sense, the twig is a curious token because he wants us to know what it means to him.  Despite what it may mean to him, he once more proclaims exposes his vulnerability to us that despite the trees ability to stand alone with joyous dark green leaves, he simply could not.

With the third poem, we see a change in moods.  Despite his accomplishments and praises, the poet is still alone.  He is thankful for having perfect health when waking up each morning, but he is still incomplete he is still alone.  However, this mood would not last long.  He wanders the beach at night, bathes in the ocean in a cleansing of his body and spirit for in the morning, his friend, his lover, would be coming.  With each breath he took, with each moment that passed, they grew sweeter as the arrival of his lover neared.  When the poets lover finally arrives, he is finally complete.  Hearing the waters rolling along the shores at night produces a calming affect, the same feeling he has lying there in bed beside his lover, happy and as one.

From the tone of poem four, it is obvious to the reader that the relationship between the speaker and his lover has ended.  The poem opens with our speaker sitting alone, speculating that there are others like him, in other places, who also sit alone, yearning and pensive.  No matter where he looks, no matter what country he visits, he will find men just like him, men who love other men.  These men are brothers to him, bonded by abandonment, loneliness, and despair.  Regardless of their nationality, what language they speak, he feels he should love them, just as he has loved men in America he should be happy with them, because of this bond that they share.

In poem five, the mood shifts once again, this time to reminiscence.  He is thinking back to his youth, where a naïve mind felt that it only took knowledge to survive in the world.  He was engrossed in the lands, the Land of the Prairies and the savannas of the south; these lands consumed him in such a way that he felt he, alone, should be the singer of their songs, to spread their message to others like him so that they, too, could experience what he experienced there this was his mission.  He soon met others like him, others who were brave enough to love and have relations with other men, fearless to what others might say, and he felt he had it in him to be as brave and fearless as they were; they gave him the courage to spread his word.

Unfortunately, this did not turn out as he had hoped.  Our speaker is back in the present, addressing the lands prairies, savannas, Ohio, Niagara, California telling them to find someone else to sing their songs, his songs.  He has been so hurt and betrayed that he realizes he cannot sing these songs if he does not believe in them.  The speaker had found his perfect love in his now-departed lover, but he ended up so hurt in the end that he stopped believing in love, it is now empty and tasteless to me.  He is now indifferent to what he has written; he was supposed to be with his lover, that they should never be apart, and that should be enough, but alas, it was not.

Though it is a relatively calm poem, the pain our speaker feels is still evidently clear in poem six.  He sees a battle ship arriving in port, which moves him in a way unlike the day before or the night with which he walks in, or even the city he calls home which he loves so much.  On the pier, he sees two sailors parting ways, clinging in a passionate embrace and kiss.  It pains him to see this as it reminds him too much of the passion he felt for his beloved who has forsaken him.

In poem seven, our speaker addresses the poets who may come after him and look back on his writings.  He tells them to disregard what he has written, but instead to take a look at the man who wrote them, the man who lies underneath that impassive exterior.  Regardless of the pain he has felt and expressed in his poems prior to this one, he wants to be known as a tender lover.  He no longer believes in the poems he has written, so it is not the love or pain written therein he wants to be remembered for, but rather for the amount of love that he has to offer as he continues to walk alone, searching for a love strong enough to surpass that which he had felt with his former lover.  He reminisces about him often as he lay in his bed at night, sleepless and dissatisfied that the lover would think nothing more of him it is enough to make him sick.  He was happiest then, when they were as one, inseparable and arm-in-arm as they walked the streets or strolled through fields together.

The discontentment and despair continues in poem eight, but on a new level.  The days drag by for our speaker, filled with sorrow as he often sits alone in a corner, his head in his hands, crying.  Sleepless nights often result in passionate, anguished trips throughout the city streets or country roads as he tries to stifle his cries.  In the previous poems he was lamenting his lover leaving him, but he is in more pain now because his lover has found someone new.  His darkest fears have come true the lover has moved on and forgotten about him.

This is a pain he has never felt before.  He does not know what to make of this dark, searing anguish which wells inside of him.  Certainly no one else could have ever experienced anything this bad before; once again he wonders if others have ever had these feelings.  Are there others out there like him who hurt like this, who have ever felt such abandonment before?  These questions reveal his own torment: he still harbors feelings of love and anguish for his former lover, he wakes in the morning only to sulk through the day before going to bed at night and lying there in sleepless fits.  What is worse is that even the slightest thing can cause him to remember his lost lover.  His love for the rough type, the uneducated laborer, is everywhere in the city, down every street and around every corner he is surrounded by his former lover no matter how hard he tries to escape it.  Being someone of the rough type himself, our speaker can only wonder if his former lover feels the same way does he see the speaker in these same, albeit older, types.

Poem nine begins the conclusion of the sequence.  Interestingly enough, these last four poems are all short in comparison to the previous eight.  The difference here is that our speaker states his point clearly in the poems rather than fill them with lines of constant despair and sorrow; he is rising from the ashes of his burned heart and moving on with life.  Poem nine is a dream, taking us back to his idea of a perfect city where all the men share a close, brotherly bond and can publicly express their affections for one another without being looked down upon.  Nothing was greater there than manly love it led the rest.  Everything about this city revolved around the love shared between two men.

Similarly to poem nine, the tenth poem in the sequence takes place within a dream-like place.  Our speaker is addressing his future lover, whoever it may be.  The lover is someone he has not met yet, but the speaker visits him quietly and often in his dreams.  Here they are together and this new lover fuels the fires of passion within him, unbeknownst to the future lover.

Our speaker uses poem eleven to talk about himself in comparison to the Earth impassive, ample.  He has already described himself as impassive once before, in poem seven, and like the Earth, his love is ample, but he recognizes that is not all.  There is something new welling in the Earth, in him.  He has found a new love, an athlete, and with it something new within himself, a new feeling.  This feeling is new, indescribable, something he cannot express even in his own poetry.

In his last poem, our speaker addresses his athlete.  Like his former lover before him, this new lover is also his student and there is much our speaker has to offer, to teach.  But before he can begin to teach the athlete, he poses one question to him.  If the blood of friendship, of love, does not course through his veins, if he does not secretly select lovers the same way our speaker does, what is the point in wasting his time?  Though he has moved beyond his former lover, the pain of the break-up and the scar of the relationship are still evident on our speakers heart; he is simply guarding himself so that this new lover will not hurt him the way his former lover did.

As Whitman was putting this third edition of Leaves of Grass together in 1859, he quickly realized the volatility of the Live Oak sequence.  He had been so guarded in the past, in both his true, deep feelings and in the content of his poetry that he could not afford to jeopardize his reputation on this new and extremely revealing sequence.  But at the same time, these twelve poems were very personal to Whitman and he wanted to keep them in this newest edition, yet could not figure out how to do this without leaving himself so vulnerable and exposed.

While putting the book together, Whitman took the Live Oak poems and rearranged its sequence, even going so far as to take some of the poems and rephrase them so that they would not be so adhesive in nature.  Those that remained relatively unchanged he used to create a new section he titled Calamus, named after the Long Island Calamus, thereby rejecting the Gulf Coast tree of his past and embracing this new plant for its sweet scent, pale pink color, and blatantly phallic shape.  The poems he made drastic changes to became a part of another new section he titled Children of Adam, which was in direct opposition to Calamus Children of Adam promoted heterosexual love.  With the creation of these two new sections, Whitman was able to solve his conflict of promoting male/male love while balancing it at the same time with a heterosexual counterpart.

After the third edition of Leaves of Grass was finally published in 1860, Whitmans style of writing changed.  With Live Oak he realized just how dramatic an effect love and relationships had on his writing and how dangerous that could be to his career.  From 1860 until his death in 1891, Whitmans writings became less and less sexual in nature, despite the many other relationships he would have. 

In addition to this, Whitman changed his writing style from free verse to a sonnet-like style, similar to that used by Shakespeare.  It is entirely possible that Whitman read Shakespeares sonnets and, seeing hidden clues and hints within the writing that were similar to his own, found that this was a safer style of writing for him.  His poems could still be adhesive in nature but the sexuality would be removed, thus making them increasingly less obvious to their meaning and safer to read.

No matter how many papers or books are written on Whitman and his homosexuality, the debate over Whitmans true sexuality will never be fully answered.  The poet left behind daybooks with a plethora of entries which give credence to those who argue his homosexuality, but it is Whitman himself who could only answer the question.  We have to read his poetry and take it for our own personal interpretations.  Whitman was writing as a man working the streets might act: he reveals just enough to entice us, to pique our interest, yet leave enough hidden to keep us coming back for more until our curiosity and appetite are satisfied.  He is the poetic gigolo and we, the readers, are his Johns.  But is our thirst every truly quenched?  Since he is still widely read, reviewed, and written about today, the obvious answer is No.

Works Cited

Aspiz, Harold.  Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful.  Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980.

Fone, Byrne.  Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.

Groff, David and Berman, Richard.  Whitmans Men.  New York: Universe Publishing, 1995.

Helms, Alan.  HintsFaint Clews and Indirections: Whitmans Homosexual Disguises.  Walt Whitman: Here and Now.  Ed. Joann P. Krieg.  Westport: Greenwood, 1985: 61-67.

Lily, Mark.  The Homophobic Academy.  Gay Mens Literature in the Twentieth Century.  London: MacMillan, 1993: 1-14.

Shively, Charles, Ed.  Calamus Lovers: Whitmans Working Class Camerados.  San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987.

Whitman, Walt.  Whitman Manuscripts Live Oak, with Moss.  The Walt Whitman Archive.   Ed. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price.  <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/archive1/ manuscripts/moss/oak.html> (9 March 2004)

Whitman, Walt.  Leaves of Grass.  New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993.

Works Consulted

Cady, Joseph.  Drum-Taps and Nineteenth Century Male Homosexual Literature.  Walt Whitman: Here and Now.  Ed. Joann P. Krieg.  Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985: 49-59.

Grossman, Jay.  The Canon in the Closet: Matthiessens Whitman, Whitmans Mathiessen.  American Literature.  70.4 (1998): 799-832.  <http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/kjohnso1/PDF/ENGL113_kj_grossman_matt.pdf> (15 Feb. 2004)

Helms, Alan.  Whitmans Live Oak with Moss.  The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman.  Ed. Robert K. Martin.  Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1992: 185-205.  <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/fdw/volume3/price/lowm.php? inc=helms> (10 Nov 2002)

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie.  Whitmans Calamus: A Rhetorical Prehistory of the First Gay American.  Modern Language Association Convention.  December 1998.  Body Electric.  <http://www-english.tamu.edu/pubs/body/calamus.html> (10 Nov. 2002)

---.  Whitmans Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text.  Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.

Loving, Jerome.  Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself.  Berkeley: U of California P, 1999.

Martin, Robert K.  Walt Whitman (1819-1892).  GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, & Queer Culture.  <http://www.glbtq.com/ literature/whitman_w.html> (15 Feb. 2004)

Miller, James E., Jr.  Calamus: The Leaf and the Root.  A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass.  <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/lukas/whit/calhead.html> (15 Feb. 2004)

Mitchell, Jason Paul.  Constructing Walt Whitman: The Critics Contend With the Good G(r)ay Poet.  Constructing Walt Whitman.  <http://home.olemiss.edu/ ~jmitchel/walt.htm> (9 Nov. 2002)

Norton, Rictor.  Walt Whitman, Prophet of Gay Liberation.  The Great Queens of History, updated 18 Nov. 1999.  <http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/whitman.htm> (9 Nov. 2002)

Parker, Hershel.  The Real Live Oak, with Moss: Straight Talk about Whitmans Gay Manifesto.  Nineteenth-Century Literature 51 (1996): 145-60.  <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/fdw/volume3/price/lowm.php?inc=parker> (10 Nov. 2002)

Schmidgall, Gary.  Walt Whitman: A Gay Life.  New York: Dutton, 1997.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky.  From Epistemology of the Closet.  Conflicting Views on Reading Literature.  Ed. David H. Richter.  Boston: Bedford, 1994: 181-186.

Shively, Charles, Ed.  Drum Beats: Walt Whitmans Civil War Boy Lovers.  San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1989.