Pink Leaves of Grass

Recovering and Identifying Whitmans Hidden Homosexuality in Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman is widely considered to be one of the finest poets admitted to the American literary canon.  It is this same canon, however, that does not want to admit that Whitman is considered in most liberal circles to be the first gay American.  But what is it that has earned him such a distinction?  When Whitman published the third edition of Leaves of Grass in 1860 he included a new section titled Calamus.  The words written in these new pages are what earned Whitman this distinction.

Walt Whitman, by all accounts, was a man with lofty dreams.  In Walt Whitman, Prophet of Gay Liberation, Rictor Norton wrote of Whitman, saying: [he] is Americans greatest embarrassment, because if what he says about democracy is true, then the American ideal of universal equality is inherently homosexual, and homosexual love is the physiological basis of democracy (1).  I do not feel that he should be considered an embarrassment, but rather Americas greatest dreamer and hopeful.  To Whitman, the love shared between two men was just as equal and powerful as that which is shared between a man and a woman.  And it is this equality, though somewhat disguised, he expressed in his poetry.

Like all great poets, Whitmans work was greatly influenced by his own personal demons and emotions.  In the early part of 1848 he left New York and headed west with his brother to work for a newspaper in New Orleans.  Little did he realize just how much of an impact this trip would have on him, both personally and sexually.  It is during this time in New Orleans that it is believed Whitman had his first homosexual experience.  Although only a few months in New Orleans, Whitman lived through springtime and the Mardi Gras, which always makes men a little more sexual, a little more available (Calamus Lovers 13).  As a result of the illicit affair, he penned the poem Once I Passd Through A Populous City (Norton 2). 

Once I passd through a populous city imprinting my brain for future

use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions,

Yet now of all that city I remember only a man I casually met

there who detaind me for love of me,

Day by day and night by night we were together all else has long

been forgotten by me,

I remember I say only that a man who passionately clung to me,

Again we wander, we love, we separate again,

Again he holds me by the hand, I must not go,

I see him close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.

Though the poem tells the tale of an intimate experience with a man, Whitman later changed all of the words relating from a male to female.  Part of this new version reads:

            I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me,

Again we wander, we love, we separate again,

Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,

I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.

Whitman knew what he had experienced, but did not yet entirely understand it.  Though he was not offended or disgusted by what had happened, he recognized that such a blatant openness would not be tolerated by society.

When Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, he shattered the world of tennis and tea, the stuffy drawing rooms of decorous morality (Norton 4).  By this point, Whitman was already having conflicts about whether to be free and open as to whom he truly was or whether to keep it reserved and conform to the rest of society.  Unfortunately for Whitman, a vast majority of society did not pay attention to the book, but those who did considered it to be scandalous and filled with nothing but filth.  Interestingly enough, for as much as the critics condemned the work, they rarely actually said what it was that they were condemning.  With the Calamus poems, Whitman appears to have found a happy medium to this problem, though he was never entirely happy at having to conceal who he really was.

It is not known when he wrote the first poem that would go into the Calamus section, but at the core of these works is a sequence of twelve poems that Whitman called Live Oak, with Moss, using the Gulf coast tree and moss as a symbol for homosexual love.  The second of these twelve was I Saw In Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing:

                        I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,

                        All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,

                        Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green

                        And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,

But I wonderd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there

            without its friend near, for I knew I could not,

And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and

            twined around it a little moss,

And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,

It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,

(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)

Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;

For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana

            solitary in a wide flat space,

Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,

I know very well I could not.

The Live Oak, with Moss poems represented liberation for Whitman, a declaration of who he really was.  But recalling the negative publicity he received from the first publication of Leaves of Grass, Whitman felt that this particular sequence was too revealing.  The series told a story of profound but unrequited love, of darkness and heartache, and of resolve and salvation, all of which was based off of his second love affair with a man simply known as M.  Evidence of this can be seen in the eighth poem of the sequence.  An incredibly heartfelt poem full of pain and hurt, it cannot be paraphrased, or will a few lines sum up the weight of the poem in its entirety.  The poem reads:

Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted,

Hours of the dusk, when I withdraw to a lonesome and

unfrequented spot, seating myself, leaning my face in my hands;

Hours sleepless, deep in the night, when I go forth,

speeding swiftly the country roads, or through the

city street, or pacing miles and miles, stifling

plaintive cries;

Hours discouraged, distracted for the one I cannot

content myself without, soon I saw him content

himself without me;

Hours when I am forgotten, (O weeks and months are

passing, but I believe I am never to forget!)

Sullen and suffering hours! (I am ashamed but it is

useless I am what I am;)

Hours of my torment I wonder if other men ever have

the like, out of the like feelings?

Is there even one other like me distracted his friend,

his lover, lost to him?

Is he too as I am now? Does he still rise in the morning,

dejected, thinking who is lost to him? and at night,

awaking, think who is lost?

Does he too harbor his friendship silent and endless?

harbor his anguish and passion?

Does some stray reminder, or the casual mention of a

name, bring the fit back upon him, taciturn and

deprest?

Does he see himself reflected in me? In these hours,

does he see the face of his hours reflected?

But more importantly, as Hershel Parker writes in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Live Oak was also extraordinarily daring, since the sequence explicitly traced states of mind (and mind-body) during a homosexual love affair and its aftermath. (148)  Whitman wanted to keep them in his book, but he also wanted to diminish just how revealing they were as a whole, so he split them up, reworded a few, and scattered them throughout Calamus and another new section, Children of Adam, which contained poems of heterosexual love.  M. Jimmie Killingsworth says of the two new sections:

Mainly adaptations of previously composed poems [i.e. Once I passd through a Populous City], Children of Adam may best be read as itself resulting from the rhetoric of Calamus, a record of the poets effort to balance the intensity of the homoerotic poems.  The balancing strategy fits nicely with Whitmans understanding of the difference between male-female love and male-male lovethe balancing act of his personal life is reflected in the rhetorical balancing of the two sections in the 1860 Leaves. (2)

As he was preparing his 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass for publication, Whitman was visited by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Surprisingly enough, when Emerson looked over Whitmans proofs, he did not object to anything in the Calamus poems, but rather objected to two others outside of this section, which he warned would be too provocative.  In Biography: Walt Whitman, it was written:

Compared with the homoeroticism of the Calamus poems, a dalliance with a prostitute or solitary masturbation [subjects of the two poems Emerson objected to] seem trivial sins, but Emerson didnt object to Calamus.  Why not?  Because Emerson read Whitman with a nineteenth-century American perspective that has been lost today.  When Emerson read about boatsmen and other roughs walking hand in hand, he presumed that Whitman meant romantic friendship, a chaste love between men that Whitman said was the foundation of American democracy (6).

Indeed, such a relationship that Emerson saw in the poems was commonplace in Victorian America.  Many examples of correspondence between men of that era still survive today, letters which proclaim undying love for each other even as they ask advice in finding a wife (Biography 6).  These friends, however, understood the limits to their friendship and relationship, so unless they were otherwise homosexual and engaged in a deep relationship with someone, they never engaged in sexual relations.  If they did engage in such a relationship and were not homosexual, they knew they had crossed a moral barrier.

The Live Oak, with Moss poetry, however, is only a small fragment of the collection contained in the Calamus section and do not tell the entire story of Whitmans trials and emotions.  Sometime between 1856 and 1860, Whitman became involved with a man named Fred Vaughn, for whom a majority of the Calamus poems were written for.  Vaughn also inadvertently became the model by which Whitmans future lovers were compared to (Calamus Lovers 14).

Nearly all of Whitmans poems profess a fondness for his working class camerados, that is to say ferrymen, carriage drivers, dock workers, etc.  These men were often fairly uneducated and illiterate, and yet Whitman related to them.  A prime example of this can be seen in part of the Calamus poem, A Glimpse:

Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremarkd seated in a corner,

Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand []

Whitman eventually grew more comfortable with his sexuality, but rather than try to hide it out of shame, he started to become ambiguous towards it.  He could often be found playing with the limits of the sayable, retreating when he was found out, and he worked hard to construct a public image for himself as that was based on both his role as the American national poet and his role as the secret gay poet (Mitchell 3).

Even up until his death, Whitman was torn between these two identities.  He tried so hard to become Americas poet, but was hampered in this by his desire to be open about who he truly was.  Even today, as applauded as he is for his outspokenness of freedom of sexuality, he still has not become what he truly wanted to be.  Perhaps, as time goes on, our society will get to a point where everyone, no matter what, is accepted for who they are and what they have accomplished.  Only then can Walt Whitman finally be considered the true bard of the country he so dearly loved.

Works Cited

 Biography: Walt Whitman.  Story in Depth: Walt Whitman http://www.gayhistory.com/rev2/events/whitman.htm (13 Nov. 2002)

Helms, Alan.  Whitmans Live Oak with Moss.  The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman.  Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992.

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).

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.

Reynolds, David S.  Walt Whitmans American: A Cultural Biography.  New York: Knopf, 1995.

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

Shivley, Charley.  Calamus Lovers: Whitmans Working Class Camerados.  San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987.