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Whitman's “Calamus”: The Leaf and the Root

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

James E. Miller Jr.
James E. Miller Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska, Lincoln 8
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Extract

No section in Leaves of Grass has received so much close attention and been the center of so much discussion and controversy as “Calamus.” Friends of Whitman, particularly the “hot little prophets,” have indignantly defended the section against the charge of “indecency,” usually by raising the opposite cry, “purity,” and by citing Whitman's own saintlike, spiritual life as proof that the poems could not be unwholesome. William Sloane Kennedy calls “Calamus” “Whitman's beautiful democratic poems of friendship” and adds, “A genuine lover speaks in the Calamus pieces: a great and generous heart there pours forth its secret. Set side by side with these glowing confessions, other writings on friendship seem frigid and calculating.” At the opposite extreme is Mark Van Doren's recent judgment which has been widely influential: “His [Whitman's] democratic dogmas—of what validity are they when we consider that they base themselves upon the sentiment of ‘manly love,‘ and that manly love is neither more nor less than an abnormal and deficient love?” To the serious reader of “Calamus,” the “manly love” which recurs both as a term and an idea is of such genuine poetic complexity as to render it a good deal more than “abnormal” and considerably less than “deficient.”

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 1 , March 1957, pp. 249 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

Note 1 in page 249 Reminiscences of Walt Whitman (London: Alexander Gardner, 1896), pp. 133–134; “Walt Whitman, Stranger,” The Private Reader (New York: Henry Holt, 1942), p. 82.

Note 2 in page 250 March 28–July 24, 1888, volume (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906), I, 75.

Note 3 in page 250 Quoted in Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer (New York : MacMillan, 1955), p. 535.

Note 4 in page 251 For a valuable account of Whitman's debt to phrenology for part of his key vocabulary, see Edward Hungerford, “Walt Whitman and His Chart of Bumps,” Amer. Lit. (Jan. 1931), ii, 350–384.

Note 5 in page 251 The Complete Writings, ed. Richard M. Bucke et al. (New York: Putnam, 1902), v, 80. Hereafter this edition will be referred to in the text parenthetically by volume and page number.

Note 6 in page 252 Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs, Comrades (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), p. 17. For another example of Whitman's “Calamus” feelings in real as contrasted with his poetic life, see G. W. Allen, pp. 297–299, an account of the relationship of the poet and Thomas P. Sawyer reconstructed from letters written in 1863.

Note 7 in page 253 Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955, p. lxiv.

Note 8 in page 255 Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860), p. 376.

Note 9 in page 255 Quotations from the final or “deathbed” edition of Leaves of Grass may be easily located by title in any of the many current editions of the book. All such quotations have been checked with the text in the 1902 Complete Writings.

Note 10 in page 255 Leaves of Grass (1860 ed.), p. 355.

Note 11 in page 258 Clara Barrus, p. 108.

Note 12 in page 258 Walt Whitman's Workshop, ed. Clifton Joseph Furness (Harvard Univ. Press, 1928), pp. 63–64.

Note 13 in page 264 Leaves of Grass (1860 ed.), p. 377.

Note 14 in page 264 William Sloane Kennedy, The Fight of a Book for the World (West Yarmouth, Mass.: Stonecroft Press, 1926), p. 177.

Note 15 in page 270 Leaves of Grass (1860 ed.), p. 359. This was 1. 3 in the original version.