Professor of English, Emeritus
California State University, Fresno
Is Whitman the Good, Gay Poet?
| Gene Bluestein Professor of English, Emeritus California State University, Fresno |
Sex as a Literary
Theme: Is Whitman the Good, Gay Poet? |
For his part, Whitman thought Wilde "frank and outspoken
and manly." During Wilde's second visit in May 1882, Ellmann
notes, "Whitman had made no effort to conceal his homosexuality
from him as he would do with John Addington Symonds." Wilde
maintained, "The kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips."
There were, of course, no witnesses to any of these occurrences.
Scholars interested in Whitman are increasingly turning their
attention to his sexual orientation and attitudes, more and more
insisting that Whitman is indeed the "good, gay poet."
There is no question that the general issue is crucial to our
understanding of the founder of modern poetry. But not enough
attention is paid to Whitman's comments about the significance
of sex in his work. In one his most insightful statements, Whitman
explains in A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads:
From another point of view "Leaves of Grass" is avowedly
the song of Sex and Amativeness, and even Animality--though meanings
that do not usually go along with those words are behind all and
will duly emerge; and all are sought to be lifted into a different
light and atmosphere. . . .Difficult as it will be, it has become,
in my opinion, imperative to achieve a shifted attitude from superior
men and women toward the thought and fact of sexuality, as an
element in character, personality, the emotions, and a theme in
literature. . . .The vitality of it is altogether in its relations,
bearings, significance--like the clef of a symphony.
I propose to examine Whitman's approach to sex in the light of
his comments to show that, as he was a pioneer in the development
of poetic techniques, so was he also a forerunner of contemporary
sexual ideas and attitudes. This is especially true in his awareness
that men and women are not so separate in their sexuality as is
usually thought--an approach, by the way, similar to that of Emily
Dickinson. In fact, the main impetus of his writing on sexuality
does not lead, as many now insist, to homoeroticism but rather
to an understanding that male and female are inclusive rather
than exclusive terms. Hence, there is in Whitman a comprehension
of what may be called sexual plenitude, a position that agrees
with a good deal of contemporary thinking. Such a view easily
explains Whitman's tendency sometimes to mask his deepest feelings
on the subject, not out of what is now being called homosexual
panic, but because he knew that so universal a view would most
likely be misconstrued.
At the same time, we need to recall that Whitman was also a committed
symbolist who believed that truth lay only in indirection rather
than direct statement. Consequently, it's no surprise to find
the poet's conception of sexuality best expressed in the wide
range of his work rather than in isolated passages or simple statements
and explanations. If we look at some of those crucial passages
we can see that almost always in Whitman's poetry sex functions
1) as shock value (he knew very well what would be the impact
on his middle class audience of such exclamations as "Undrape"
or his recurring threats to disrobe and run naked or to "plunge
his semitic muscle"); 2) as a symbol of the poet's creativity;
and 3) as a translation of Emerson's approach to the literary
epiphany. At his most effective, Whitman manages to join all three
in defining what I think he meant by "sex as a literary theme."
As we'll see there is often more involved but I submit that those
three elements (shock value, the idea of creativity, and the representation
of epiphany) are the main components of a system which notably
does not include homosexuality as a central concern but only as
one symbol of the poet's universality.
Since so much of the argument for Whitman's alleged homosexuality
is psychoanalytical it's also worth noting that such criticism
almost always forgets what Freud persistently and carefully described
as the limits of his approach. "In psychology," he maintained,
"we can only describe things by the help of analogies. There
is nothing peculiar in this; it is the case elsewhere as well.
But we have constantly to keep changing these analogies, for none
of them lasts us long enough."
I'll begin with what is usually taken to be the most notorious
of Whitman's erotic passages, the famous section 5 of "Song
of Myself," which is still often taboo in and out of the
classroom. It is not only what seems to be the explicit sexuality
that causes problems, but the equally vexing mysticism that turns
many readers off. The reaction to sections like this helps to
explain the fact that most Americans know little about Whitman's
poetry, since any junior high school or high school teacher who
dealt with section 5 would not last long in her job; indeed many
college instructors have similar problems. This perhaps explains
the recent question from a Riverside, California reader to a Personality
Parade column in a Sunday magazine section. "During the swing
era," the writer states, "there was a band leader named
Whitman or Whiteman--I can't remember which. His first name was
Walt, I think.. Can you help me?" I can recall very well
as an undergraduate how we went from section 1 of "Song of
Myself" to sections 2, 3, 4, and 6. And the same was true
in graduate school where my professor, a sophisticated critic
of American literature, spent very little time looking closely
at the infamous section 5.
It's ironic that despite the general lack of awareness of Whitman,
his influence permeates those levels of popular culture well known
by younger generations. This has come about through the impact
of Whitman on figures like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan
and others involved in what I have called poplore, as well as
other contemporary expressions of popular song. Guthrie, for example,
was often hypnotized by the names of the states and liked to reproduce
them in close imitation of Whitman's catalogues. "Do Re Mi,"
one of Guthrie's best known Dust Bowl Ballads has the chorus:
If you ain't got the do re mi, boys,
If you ain't got the do re mi.
You better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia,
Tennessee.
And in "This Land Is Your Land," his own version
of what Whitman called "a psalm to the republic," Guthrie's
lines replicate Whitman's approach. Who, except Whitman and Guthrie,
would juxtapose "California and the New York island"
to provide a sense of the full breadth of the nation, and consciously
include the city as part of the essential mix? Moreover there
is hardly a better example of Whitman's ideas in "Slang in
America" than the contemporary "rap" music, which
takes literally Whitman's injunction to make poetry out of the
language of the streets. This is a kind of poetry Whitman would
have exulted in, even more so if his influence were acknowledged.
But to return to Whitman's poetry. Whitman leads up to his first
major epiphanic passage in "Song of Myself" with a series
of symbols that underline the theme of sex in consciously shocking
images, defining "the procreant urge of the world."
The dialectic is clear to him as, he insists, it is to all of
us if we would only stop looking "through the eyes of the
dead" and stop feeding on "the spectres in books."
"Out of the dimness opposite equals advance" which expresses
what Whitman sees as a "mystery." Here as in his later
work, Whitman never pretends that he can understand or control
his sexuality. In a section where he uses Emerson's approach to
indirection and the source of epiphany, Whitman focuses on the
relations between the body and the soul, explaining:
Clear and sweet is my soul. . . .And clear and sweet is all that
is not my soul.
Lack one lacks both. . . .And the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.
In a strategy similar to that of James Joyce, Whitman often gives clues to his method in the text itself. Here Whitman is working with Emerson's basic esthetic, showing how the precise invocation of natural facts (the seen) leads us inevitably to the moment of transcendence and illumination (the unseen), the epiphany as Emerson called it. But only briefly, whereupon we return again to the material level. This is an approach that I have called "transcendental materialism." But Whitman cannot resist the opportunity to shock the bourgeois mentality:
Showing the best and dividing it from the worst, age vexes
age,
knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while
they discuss I am silent and go bathe and admire myself.
Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man
hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile and none shall
be less familiar than the rest.
As he had earlier threatened to disrobe and run "naked and undisguised by the bank," so Whitman here argues for an egalitarian physiology that foreshadows the equally shocking catalogue of natural facts that would appear in "Children of Adam." After boasting about spending the night with God ("a loving bedfellow") Whitman has teased enough and concentrates now on the significance of these ambiguous sexual images, but not before providing a caveat his current critics often miss:
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next.
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
I like to think of that last line as a quintessential Protestantism
in Whitman, an echo of the Puritans' mandate to be in the world,
while recalling the requirement to be aloof from its temptations
as well; it is another instance of transcendental materialism,
the crucial commitment to the material world, without which there
is no possible connection to spiritual truth. As Emerson put it,
"the use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural
history. . .," since nature is "the present expositor
of the divine mind." Above all, the passage reminds us not
to take Whitman literally, for we are dealing here with art, not
simple autobiography.
And then Whitman gives us his great epiphany, the best definition
of what he meant by sex as a literary theme:
I believe in you my soul. . . .the other I am must not abase
itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
Loafe with me on the grass. . . .Loose the stop from your throat.
Not words, not music or rhyme I want. . . .Not custom or lecture,
not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning.
You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon
me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue
to my barestript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held
my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge
that pass all the art and argument of the earth:
And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my
own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers. . . .And
the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love;
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them.
And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones and elder
and mullein and pokeweed.
It's important to recall how perfectly this passage translates
Emerson's esthetic, based on reading natural facts for their spiritual
truths to attain epiphanies, those "best moments in life,"
those "delicious awakenings" that Emerson insisted could
only be experienced from a material ground point. The epiphany
being ephemeral (or we would be in Eden again), the passage descends
from the peak of ecstasy to the world of the body, where the catalogue
of natural facts begins again to accumulate the necessary power
to effect another illumination. After all, Emerson said, "A
man is a god in ruins."
Emerson's famous epiphany in Nature (1836), the transparent
eyeball passage, is characteristically anything but delicious.
In his moment of mysticism Emerson becomes nothing. "The
name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental:
to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then
a trifle and a disturbance." Ultimately and in accordance
with the conventional sublime he becomes "the lover of uncontained
and immortal beauty." Most telling is his notion that the
essence of his beautiful vision "is in the distant line of
the horizon," a position that provides detachment and even
indifference to human kind.
Typically, when the chips are down, Emerson disavows his theory
of transcendental materialism and opts for a more orthodox philosophical
idealism; thus he avoids the dangers of a commitment to the body
under any circumstances. Whitman is also essentially an idealist,
but he is faithful to Emerson's notion that the material is the
necessary stage from which the epiphanic potential is launched.
Without it we end up often with a poetry disembodied, abstract--indeed
not poetry at all but moral guidelines with sugar coatings. As
Whitman noted in the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, "The
poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract
addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts,
but is the life of these and much else in the soul." So the
apostrophe is to the soul and in the process, as is often the
case with Whitman, what seems so radically new is actually one
of the oldest themes in poetic history, a dialogue between the
body and the soul. Traditionally, of course, the body is remanded
to its inferior place, for its sexuality is the source of sin
and can only stain the purity of the soul.
Whitman's great epiphany is, according to his strategy, outrageously
sexual, and he knows how to frame the idea with loaded terms like
"loafe" and "loose," words which signal to
the reader that something illicit must be next. And indeed it
is, for the overriding image is of sexual intercourse--well, perhaps
something worse. The trouble begins with the statement "your
head athwart my hips" and for many who argue for Whitman's
homosexualism, this is the first of a series of images that proclaim
his preference for oral sex. But if we accept these literal interpretations,
we not only miss the point of the passage, we lose also Whitman's
underlying conception of sex as a literary theme, whose meaning
is not to condense our experience to a minuscule point but to
expand it, at least for the moment, illimitably.
So shocking is the central image, that even to this day, readers
stop looking and allow their vulgar imaginations to fill in the
blanks.
(Whitman's awareness of his audience's innate depravity is in
fact what makes this strategy possible. (An early title for Leaves
of Grass was The Flowers of Evil.) An accurate reading
of the passage, however, depends on the ability to read "tongue
to heart," which was apparently as difficult to do in Whitman's
time as it is in ours. Even the sexual position Whitman proposes
needs to be carefully identified to avoid any suggestion of "perversion."
One partner is sitting, perhaps reclining against a tree, with
the other's head on the companion's lap. (You can observe the
scene on any warm day in a park or on a campus.) That is how you
reach from the beard to the feet, turning not to the groin ð@@Å-ite
directio}Ã`ongue to heart.
If we read these natural facts for their spiritual truths, the
essential meanings of the sexual images come into focus. The tongue
gives the heart the power of expression, allows it to be creative,
bringing into existence the poet, whose highest moment is in the
conception of an orgasm, the true merging of the physical and
the spiritual. To lack one, is to lack the other. In that sense,
sexuality is neither hetero, homo, mono, multi, incestuous nor
any other simple variation. It is the symbol of the poet's creative
power. And it's no accident that the act leads to an echo from
Saint Paul, to the supreme moment that passes "all the argument
of the earth." I think we do Whitman a major injustice and
skew our judgments severely when we characterize elements of his
descriptions of sex without reference to the framework I have
been discussing. Unlike Emerson, Whitman's epiphany brings him
into contact not only with God, but also his brothers and sisters;
that is to say, he saw clearly that if the natural fact is sex,
the spiritual truth is love. That is what the soul explains to
the body and what the tongue brings to the heart, thereby reversing
the traditional relationship of the body and soul.
Whitman consistently uses the tongue as an image of creativity
in "Song of Myself," as in section 47:
I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time
while I wait for a boat;
It is you talking just as much as myself. . . I act as the tongue
of you.
It was tied in your mouth. . . .In mine it begins to be loosened.
When we are no longer tongue-tied our creativity is set loose;
we can not only know the meaning of poems but, as Whitman explains
in section 2, "possess the origin of all poems." And
as Emerson had maintained, every person can become a poet.
It is interesting to speculate about who is male and who female
in section 5. The soul is active; is it male? The body is passive;
is it female? Here as elsewhere in Whitman, sexual politics leads
us astray, for this is only Whitman's version of one of the oldest
literary traditions, showing the power of the muse working in
the poet. And the muse is female, as every poet who invokes her
knows, though only Whitman suggests that they make love--just
as he outrages many by intimating that he is God. (I doubt very
much that a poet ever lived who didn't feel divine.) Again the
danger of reading with too literal an approach to sexuality is
that we miss the remarkable range of Whitman's thought.
It's also quite likely that, with his interest in Egyptology,
Whitman was aware of the myth that "the world came into being
through the word of Ptah. The heart and tongue were his organs
of creation, for it was by means of his tongue that he brought
to life that which he had conceived in his heart." In another
connection with Egyptian folklore, "The tongue was the symbol
of will made manifest and of authoritative utterance and, therefore,
has certain similarities to Hu, the personification of command.
Intelligent Thoth was regarded as the tongue of the creator God,
hence he bore the name 'tongue of Re, lord of the divine words.'"
I don't mean to dismiss the importance of sex for Whitman's work,
but I think the hunt for homoeroticism (in some recent criticism
there are exceptionally vulgarized speculations) trivializes his
very sophisticated insight into the nature of sex and its significance
for literature. Whitman insisted that he had been capable of spawning
a number of illegitimate children and determinedly rejected the
"calamites" who tried to make him one of their own,
just as today I think he would rebuff the many gay artists who
blithely count him among their number. (One reads that none of
the offspring he boasted about has ever been found, but the proprietor
of Shakespeare and Company, situated now just across from Notre
Dame in Paris, is George Whitman, who claims to be a descendant
of Whitman's and prints an epigraph from the poet on the door
to his book shop.)
I don't think we will ever find a letter like the one Lenny Bruce's
uncle allegedly left, to explain Whitman's proclivities. Under
the circumstances we should recognize Whitman's intention to use
sex as a literary theme and not indulge in banal reductions of
his thought. He seemed to know what most people even today are
unwilling to admit, that we are all, as in Freud's formulation,
bisexual and hence capable of imagining and describing every form
and variety of sex, including those like prostitution and other
"perversions," which still shock bourgeois sensibilities.
But not Whitman's. Perhaps we need to take more seriously and
not simply as rhetoric his declaration toward the end of "Song
of Myself": "Do I contradict myself? / Very well then.
. . .I contradict myself; / I am large. . . .I contain multitudes."
Recordings and Books by Gene Bluestein and The Bluestein Family