Thesislog

Sophisticated English readers suspected that the revelation had something to do with those phallic processions, though Whitman fended off their invitations to be more explicit about what he called “the love of comrades,” or about what precisely transpired in his “Calamus” sequence, in which he wrote of “a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand.” “In your concept of Comradeship,” the art historian J.A. Symonds wondered, choosing his words carefully, “do you contemplate the possible intrusion of those semi-sexual emotions and actions which no doubt do occur between men?” Whitman vigorously disavowed such “morbid inferences” and claimed, recklessly, that while “always unmarried I have had six children—two are dead—One living southern grandchild, fine boy, who writes to me occasionally.”

It was Whitman’s progressive political message that had wide appeal in Europe and elsewhere, after revolutionary hopes had stalled since the various democratic stirrings of 1848. “The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots,” Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. “I speak the password primeval,” he proclaimed in the poem he later called “Song of Myself.” “I give the sign of democracy;/By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.”

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I wish Williams had allowed himself to be even more personal, more self-revealing, more open and unguarded about what a poet working today might find in the way of inspiration and possibility in Whitman’s work. Especially in the many pages that Williams (who turns seventy-four this year) devotes to Whitman’s tragic final years, one suspects the poet’s own fears coming through, about the sources of inspiration drying up, the music gone. For the most part, however, Williams is content to remain the critic, dutifully comparing, yet again, Whitman to Baudelaire as poets of the modern city and its outcasts, exploring Whitman’s “views” on the equality of men and women, and casting about for something new to say about old cruxes. Was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ambivalence about Whitman based, as “is generally read,” on his own repressed homosexuality or was it perhaps in response to “Whitman’s frankness about masturbation, which would have been a particularly delicate subject for a lifelong celibate” like Hopkins?