Walt Whitman

by Reynolds, David S. ;

  The association between Whitman and free love was often made in his day. Emerson connected him with the free love movement, as did James Harlan, Whitman’s superior in the Interior Department who in 1865 fired him, reportedly, in the belief that he “was a free lover, deserved punishment, &c.”31 When the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass was banned in Boston, it was the New England Free Love League that publicly came to Whitman’s defense and endorsed his sexual poetry.

  Still, Whitman was ambivalent about the free lovers. Like them, he saw profound defects in relations between the sexes that he tried to repair by appealing to natural passion and attraction. But he shied away from what he saw as the free lovers’ potentially disruptive effects on society. Despite his own disinclination to marry and his recognition of flaws in American marriages, he always venerated the marriage institution. “When that goes, all goes,” he wrote, emphasizing that “the divine institution of the marriage tie lies at the root of the welfare, the safety, the very existence of every Christian nation.”32

  What he wanted was the “passional” theory of the free lovers without their anti-marriage proposals. It was the poetry in the first three editions of Leaves of Grass, written when passional theory was at its peak of cultural influence, that the discourse of magnetic attraction was most pronounced. The gravity-like pull between humans expounded by Fourier and disseminated by the American reformers is felt at many moments in Whitman’s poetry. “Grossing Brooklyn Ferry” asks: “What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face? / Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?”33 Sometimes his vocabulary of attraction seems straight out of passional theory:

  O to attract by more than attraction!

  How it is I know not—yet behold! the something which obeys none of the rest,

  It is offensive, never defensive—yet how magnetic it draws.

  Just as the free lovers had discovered in passional attraction a human counterpart to the earth’s gravity, so Whitman wrote:

  I am he that aches with amorous love;

  Does the earth gravitate? does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?

  So the body of me to all I meet or know.

  Self-determination in sexual matters was the notion that free lovers had in common with many feminists and with Whitman. The reason the free lovers called marriage legalized prostitution was their vision of countless wives bound by law to husbands whom they detested and yet who had free access to their bodies. When Whitman in “A Woman Waits for Me” says that all is lacking in a woman if the moisture of “the right man” is lacking, he was advancing the idea of self-choice for women.

  All the flaws in relations between the sexes could be seen in that most public form of sex in antebellum America: prostitution. Whitman emphasized in his journalism that economic injustices against working women drove many of them to streetwalking. Sex was for sale everywhere in America’s larger cities, especially New York. Whitman noted in 1857 that nineteen of twenty urban men “are more or less familiar with houses of prostitution and are customers to them.” Among “the best classes of Men” in the New York area, he wrote, “the custom is to go among prostitutes as an ordinary thing. Nothing is thought of it—or rather the wonder is, how can there be any ‘fun’ without it.”34

  Like others, he was appalled by the way prostitution was conducted in New York. In his walks about the city he reported seeing both the “notorious courtesan taking a ‘respectable’ promenade” and the “tawdry, hateful, foul-tongued, harsh-voiced harlots.” To prevent the spread of disease and crime, he thought, prostitution should be regulated; he even suggested legalization.

  A good first step was full exposure of the problem and the cultivation of a sympathetic public attitude toward prostitutes. The prevailing attitude was one of derogation and censure. A kindlier attitude toward them emerged in moral reform circles and among the physiologists Whitman read. “Abandoned females are generally considered as constitutionally the scum and offscouring of mankind,” wrote Orson Fowler in 1851. “But are they not human beings? Perhaps as good by nature as ourselves.”35

  One of Whitman’s aims in his poetry was to extend a generous hand to the victims of deceitful men. In the 1855 preface he refers to the “serpentine poison of those that seduce women” and in a poem he mentions “the treacherous seducer of young women.”36 As for prostitutes themselves, his poems made compassionate gestures toward them. His first picture of a prostitute, in the 1855 version of “Song of Myself,” retained traces of his revulsion but tried to communicate sympathy:

  The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,

  The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,

  (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;).

  In later portraits he moved toward personal identification with them: “You prostitutes flaunting over the troittoirs or obscene in your rooms, / Who am I that I should call you more obscene than myself?”

  His most famous sympathetic gesture was his 1860 poem “To a Common Prostitute”:

  Be composed—be at ease with me—I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lusty as Nature,

  Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,

  Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle

  for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.

  My girl I appoint with you an appointment, and I charge you

  that you make preparation to be worthy to meet me,

  And I charge you that you be patient and perfect till I come.

  Till then I salute you with a significant look that you do not forget me.

  The emphasis has shifted from the massive social problem that appalled Whitman to the poetic solution, embodied in refreshing nature images (the sun, the glistening waters) and the atmosphere of dignity and formality (“be worthy to meet me,” “be patient and perfect,” “I salute you with a significant look”). This “appointment” with a prostitute was an ennobling one in which both parties profited, the “I” practicing democratic compassion, the prostitute being treated as a person rather than as a sex machine. Whitman gives a modern version of Christ’s compassionate treatment of Mary Magdalene by fusing democratic sympathy with images of beauty and ennoblement.

  Culling positive, sympathetic attitudes toward sex, the body, and women from various cultural arenas, he presented powerful images which, when taken together, created a sexual program that held up the possibility of woman’s social and personal liberation. The woman question preoccupied Whitman from the start:

  I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,

  And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,

  And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.37

  In Whitman’s day, women’s rights and motherhood were not necessarily contradictory. The feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a devoted wife and mother who took pleasure in housekeeping. Several women in Whitman’s circle, such as Paulina Wright Davis and Nelly O’Connor, were at once feminists and housekeepers. Without fear of contradiction, then, Whitman could praise simultaneously the ideas of motherhood and women’s equality. His pronouncements on equality of the sexes can sound at once feminist and familial:

  The wife, and she is not one jot less than the husband,

  The daughter, and she is just as good as the son,

  The mother, and she is every bit as much as the father.

  He was repelled by the single-minded focus of certain feminists on individual issues. For instance, when he wrote in 1876 that he stood for “the radical equality of the sexes, (not at all for the ‘woman’s rights’ point of view, however),” he seems to have been distancing himself from groups like Lucy Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association, which by then focused solely on winning the vote for women.38

  Whitman believed women’s equality could be gained only after wholesale changes in relations
between the sexes. He created in his poetry a Utopian space where such relations are restored to dignity and mutual respect. Minimized in his poems are the flaws in gender relations he perceived all around him: declining health and fertility among women; trickery and misogyny on the part of men; legal discrimination against women; mockery of prostitutes; the contrasting extremes of prudish repressiveness and pornographic lasciviousness. Maximized are physiological acceptance of the body and sex; fertility and athleticism; and an all-pervasive passional attraction.

  His poem “A Woman Waits for Me” brings together a number of these elements: a frank recognition of women’s sexual nature; admiration of the Real Woman, who can row, wrestle, shoot, and so on; a feminist claim that women “are not one jot less than I am”; and an endorsement of sexual self-determination and passional attraction, enforced in the lines about women who are aroused only by “the right man” and who “refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me.”39

  To his frustration, his candid treatment of sex enraged the moral censors of his era. Those who espoused the prudish view of sex did not approve of his sexual images, no matter how much he tried to couch them in religious or physiological language. When a British edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in 1868, the editors carefully pruned away sexual references, producing an expurgated edition. Publication of the 1881 edition was suspended by the Boston district attorney on the grounds that it violated public statutes concerning obscene literature. (The phrase “banned in Boston” came from this episode.)

  It tells us a lot about sexual mores of the time that these priggish censors complained of even the mildest references to heterosexual sex while finding nothing objectionable in Whitman’s numerous images of same-sex love. Amazingly, the 1881 censors targeted even the tame “Dalliance of the Eagles” (about the mating of birds) while leaving untouched all but one of the homoerotic “Calamus” poems—and in that one, “Spontaneous Me,” it was images of masturbation and copulation, not homoerotic ones, that were called obscene.

  Why were the “Calamus” poems, widely viewed today as homosexual love songs, permitted to stand by these exacting, puritanical readers? The answer is that same-sex love was not interpreted the same way then as it is now.

  Passionate intimacy between people of the same sex was common in pre-Civil War America. The lack of clear sexual categories (homo-, hetero-, bi-) made same-sex affection unself-conscious and widespread. Although Whitman evidently had one or two affairs with women, he was mainly a romantic comrade who had a series of intense relationships with young men, most of whom went on to get married and have children. Whatever the nature of his physical relationships with them, most of the passages of same-sex love in his poems were not out of keeping with then-current theories and practices that underscored the healthiness of such love.

  Same-sex friends often loved each other passionately. “Lover” had no gender connotation and was used interchangeably with “friend.” Thus Emerson could call his friends “excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths.”40 Similarly, Whitman in a “Calamus” poem wrote, “And when I thought how my dear friend, my lover, was on his way coming, O then I was happy.”41 The word “orgy” had no sexual connotation; it meant “party.” When Whitman writes, “I share the midnight orgies of young men,” or imagines a “city of orgies” where “lovers, continual lovers, only repay me,” he is imaginatively participating in the uninhibited gatherings that working-class comrades enjoyed.42

  Whitman in the late 1860s. Ed Folsom Collection

  It was common among both men and women to hug, kiss, and express love for people of the same sex. In hotels and inns, complete strangers often slept in the same bed. Neither “to sleep with” nor “to make love to” had the sexual meanings they would take on in the 1890s. In “Behold This Swarthy Face” Whitman typically writes: “Yet comes one a Manhattanese and ever at parting kisses me on the lips with robust love, /[…] We observe that salute of American comrades land and sea, / We are those two natural and nonchalant persons.”

  Because Whitman was disillusioned with the capitalistic forces that poisoned many heterosexual relationships, producing rampant prostitution as well as “legalized prostitution” in marriage, he wished to glorify the loving friendship he saw around him in working-class life. He said in his notebook that he wanted to find words for the “approval, admiration, friendship” seen “among young men of these States,” who he said had “wonderful tenacity of friendship, and passionate fondness for their friends.”43 He wanted to be the one who brought real-life friendship to the printed page. As he wrote in his open letter to Emerson, “as to manly friendship, everywhere observed in These States, there is not the first breath of it to be observed in print.”44

  The phrenological notion of adhesiveness was an important element of his view of comradeship. His friends the Fowlers wrote that when the organ of adhesiveness was well developed, one “loves friends with tenderness” and “will sacrifice almost anything for their sake.” Orson Fowler wrote that those with large adhesiveness “instinctively recognize it in each other; soon become mutually and strongly attached; desire to cling to the objects of their love; take more delight in the exercise of friendship than in anything else.”45 Adhesiveness had a personal and social dimension. Privately it caused people of the same sex to be drawn to each other and love each other. Socially, it was a powerful force for cohesion, with the power, as the Fowlers wrote, to “bind mankind together in families, societies, communities, &c.”

  When planning the clusters of poems for the 1860 edition of his volume, Whitman specified that the “Children of Adam” poems would embody the “amative love of women” while “Calamus” represented “adhesiveness, manly love.”46 In one “Calamus” poem he wrote, “I announce adhesiveness—I say it shall be limitless, unloosened.”47 In another he declared, “O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life!”

  The social dimension of comradeship was crucial to him as well. When discussing the “Calamus” poems with Traubel he explained that comradely love “is one of the United States—it is the quality which makes the states whole—it is their thread—but oh! The significant thread—by which the nation is held together, a chain of comrades … I know no country anyhow in which comradeship is so far developed as here—here, among the mechanic classes.”48 In the 1876 preface to his poems he wrote, “the special meaning of the ‘Calamus’ cluster of ‘Leaves of Grass’… mainly resides in its political significance,” adding that it was through “the beautiful and same affection of man for men, latent in all the young fellows, north and south, east and west” that the United States “are to be most effectually welded together, intercalcated, anneal’d into a living union.”49

  It is understandable that he made this political application of friendship with special fervor in the 1860 edition. Talk of a forthcoming “irrepressible conflict” filled the air. Lincoln had recently warned, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Since Whitman had lost faith in established institutions, he looked to friendship to unify his nation. The calamus plant, a tall, fragrant reed that grows by ponds and rivers, was a convenient metaphor. Its marginality reflected Whitman’s attempt to remove himself from mainstream institutions; its pungent odor symbolized the beauty and pervasiveness of the comradeship he hoped would replace these institutions.

  His hope for unifying his nation through loving comradeship is expressed in several “Calamus” poems, including one that asks, “States! / Were you looking to be held together by lawyers? / By an agreement on paper? Or by arms? / Away! … There shall be from me a new friendship” that “shall circulate through The States” and “twist and intertwist them through and around each other,” as “Affection shall solve everyone of the problems of freedom.”50 Through friendship,

  I will make the continent indissoluble,

  I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,

  I will make divine magnetic lands.51

  Friendship, he said ho
pefully, “will make the continent indissoluble.” Less than a year after these words were printed, the nation would be at war.

  Seven

  THE CIVIL WAR, LINCOLN, AND RECONSTRUCTION

  CIVIL WAR WAS NOT WHAT WHITMAN HAD WANTED OR EXPECTED, BUT it turned out to be what he needed—and, he came to believe, what the nation needed. “My book and the war are one,” he said in a poem.1 In the 1876 preface he explained: “The whole book, indeed, revolves around that four years’ war, which, as I was in the midst of it, becomes, in ‘Drum Taps,’ pivotal to the rest entire.”2

  In his view, the Civil War accomplished what he had hoped his poetry would accomplish. It blew away many of the social ills that his early poetry had tried to rectify. It cleared the atmosphere like a thunderstorm. It seemed to rid the North, especially Manhattan, of many of its prewar problems. It turned the fuzzy, shifting issue of states’ rights versus national power into the crystal-clear one of Secession versus Union. It made most of the people in the North rally around the ideal of union he had long cherished. It pulled together virtually all Americans, North and South, in a common action and a spirit of heroic self-sacrifice.

  Whitman got an intimate look at the war through his brother George, who joined a Brooklyn regiment in June 1861 and three months later signed on with the Fifty-first New York Volunteers under Colonel Edward Ferrero. Over the next four years George traveled more than twenty thousand miles and was in twenty-one engagements or sieges. Constantly under fire, he gave vivid accounts of the war in his letters home. Stolidly courageous, he received several promotions. Not only did George send home reports of his experiences, but his being wounded at Fredericksburg was what drew Walt to the front and then to Washington, where he nursed thousands of soldiers in the war hospitals.