Thesislog

“Symonds’s statements were the closest anyone had yet come to linking Whitman with “sexual anomalies.” Symonds’s tone was so discreet and his suggestions so hedged with double negatives that most readers seem to have been oblivious to his implications. However, the American disciples were outraged. William Sloane Kennedy, the Boston journalist and Whitman disciple, wrote, “We here in America were astounded that it seemed to [Symonds] necessary in his work on Walt Whitman to relieve the Calamus poems of the vilest of all possible interpretations. It was a sad revelation to us of the state of European morals, that even the ethical perfume of these noblest utterances on friendship could not save them from such a fate.” Kennedy defended Whitman as if the poet were a character in a Henry James novel, his American innocence threatened by European corruption. However, a more fruitful way to understand Symonds’s interpretation of “Calamus” is to consider not that Symonds went too far but that he did not go far enough.” (164)

“By the time [Carpenter] was forty he had transformed himself into a writer and social activist often labeled ‘the English Walt Whitman.’ Note, however, that he was the English Walt Whitman. The American Walt Whitman was fiercely individualistic, suspicious of political movements. Carpenter, in contrast, had a hand in virtually every reform movement of late Victorian England: socialism, vegetarianism, environmentalism, women’s rights—he wrote, spoke, donated, and organized on behalf of them all. Including, notoriously, sex reform. Whitman’s love poetry, both amative and adhesive, has a political dimension, but the poet himself always steered clear of the American “free love” movement despite attempts to enlist him in the cause. Carpenter, however, threw himself into sex reform. He believed in the connection between comrade love and political democracy that Whitman asserted in “Calamus” but went far beyond his master. Drawing, like Symonds, on the German sexologists, Carpenter argued that Urnings represented a higher stage in human evolution and were destined to lead humanity into a utopian future.” (168)

“Carpenter and Symonds believed that they were living out the democratic vision of Leaves of Grass, and they were fascinated by Whitman’s relationships with the streetcar conductor Peter Doyle and other working-class men. However, both Leaves of Grass and Whitman’s friendships fit imperfectly with the deeply class-stratified European societies in which Carpenter and Symonds lived. The two English disciples grew up in privilege and attended elite universities; Walt Whitman was raised by an unsuccessful house builder and a lightly educated homemaker and ended his formal education when he was eleven. Thanks to the relatively fluid antebellum American class system, Whitman lifted himself out of the working class, yet it is not quite accurate to label his love affairs as “cross class”; men like Peter Doyle and Harry Stafford came from backgrounds almost identical to Whitman’s. When he called Doyle or Stafford or Civil War soldiers brother or son or nephew, he was not merely using terms of endearment but suggesting that, in their backgrounds and education, these men could have been members of his own family.” (178)