CHAPTER: II
LOVING COMRADESHIP: THE ESSENTIAL KEYSTONE OF
WHITMAN’S AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of
America,
and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades
(For You O’ Democracy, Walt Whitman.1986:117).
Walt Whitman was looked upon as the forerunner of twentieth century poetry,
praising democracy, and becoming a proclaimed poet of American democracy. Walter
Whitman (1819 –1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he
was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both
views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American
canon; often called the father of free verse.He was also known as the ‘Son of Long
Island.’ He lived during the time of the Civil War; a fact that increased his patriotism.
Whitman was considered one of the most important American Poets of the nineteenth
century.
He influenced the direction of twentieth century poets such as Ezra Pound,
William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and Allen Ginsberg. “Whitman praised
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democracy and spoke of the flesh as well as the spirit. He rejected the normal rhyme
and meter of poetry and wrote in free verse, relying on Native American language”
(Alfred K Knopf.1998: 249). In general, Whitman's poetry is idealistic and romantic.
He identified strongly with the outcasts of society. He said to one outcast, "Not till the
sun excludes you do I exclude you" (Walt Whitman, Quoted in Lowen Nancy.1994:
11). People hailed him as the most authentic voice of the United States of America.
The chapter is a critical review of Whitman’s everlasting love of comrades, by
discussing its connection with his nation and American literature as a whole. Indeed,
Whitman’s transcendental vision, like melody beyond his poetic expressions, gives us
deeper insight into the great communion in the universe.
Love, a prevalent term in Leaves of Grass, is used four hundred times. Often,
“the term love stands in close relation with comrade or camerado” (Pabula
Neruda.1991:01). Love can have many definitions, but in Whitman’s work love is tied
to sexual desire, as many early critics of Whitman asserted while they suggested that
he changed this focus. Love, however, has other connotations in Leaves of Grass—
one of those is the ‘robust American love’ that Whitman stresses. While this form of
‘manly love’ can imply homosexual relations, in many instances in the text, the term
is used to signify an intimate bond between individuals.
Besides liberty, equality, which safeguards the rights of the individual, a
democracy cannot be conceived without brotherhood, which binds the citizens
together and assures the unity of a group. It is a curious thing that Whitman hardly
ever uses such words as fraternity, brotherhood, brothers. Perhaps he regarded them
as devalued because of the excessive and often insincere usage made of them by the
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churches. At any rate, he always preferred to express his very keen sense of human
brotherhood in terms of ‘comradeship.’
He was a singer and prophet of the new – born democracy. He did not like, as
the old bards used to do, to sing of kings, nobles or peers, but of the ‘divine average’
of American citizenship, busy with the homely yet honorable task of day to day life:
In the labor of engines and trades, and the labor of fields,
I find the developments;
And find the eternal meanings…..
(A Song of Occupations, Walt Whitman, 1986: 211-12).
“He filled his poems to the brim with the America he loved, the America whose
unique political mission and spacious scenery stirred and inspired him. He was deeply
influenced by Jacksonianism and by the loco–foco movement” (William J
Fisher.1970:31). Andrew Jackson, President of the U.S. from 1829-1837, favored ‘the
planter, the farmer, the mechanic and the laborer.’ Jacksonian Democracy was thus
democracy for the common people. The extremists among the Jacksonians were
known as loco-focos. They opposed large banks and industries as a monopolistic
danger. He was sharing their faith in the virtues of the plain people, in equality and
popular control of government, and in an economy characterized by a wide diffusion
of private property.
Whitman believed as he declared in Democratic Vistas that “the true gravitation
hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property,
and that the national welfare depended mainly on the safety and endurance of the
aggregate of its middling property owners”(Walt Whitman Quoted in William J
Fisher.1970:31). Through his journalistic writings, as the editor of the Brooklyn
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Eagle, he was a crusader of these ideas. He took an exalted view of his countrymen
and visualized a great democratic future for them. He foresaw a great and noble
destiny for America. He found the sources of evil in tyranny or superstition rather
than in human nature, and out of comparatively free environment of America, he
expected the emergence and growth of a proud, noble and ambitious race. This great
and free race, already in the making, needed a literature that should celebrate the
democratic present of America.
His Leaves of Grass was a landmark in the evolution of American culture,
even though it had little influence until the twentieth century. Many scholars are
prone to think that Leaves of Grass is merely a collection of lyric poetry, some good
or some bad. There have been others who have defended Whitman’s book “as the
embodiment of the American reality and ideal, as a superb fulfillment of all the
genuine requirements of the national epic, pervaded with a sense of America as a new
country demanding appropriate celebration, and filled with loving and precise
descriptions
of Americans and American scenes” (Fern Nuhn.1951: 324-38). It
pointed the way to a literature that would be genuinely indigenous and no longer mere
imitative of European models. He himself believed that his book had the basic nature
and general scope of the traditional national epic. His views on the nature of poetry as
stated in 1855 Preface and in Democratic Vistas show that he wished his Leaves of
Grass to be recognized as the epic of America.
Instead of the splendid exceptional characters of the epic of the past, the
modern epic has to portray simply man, the human being. He believed that the “New
World needs the poems of realities and science and of the democratic average and
basic equality. In the centre of all, and object of all, stands the ‘Human Being’,
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towards whose heroic and spiritual evolutions poems and everything directly or
indirectly tend, old world or new”(Richard M Bucke.1901:54). He celebrated the
common place and earthly. To him, the whole cosmos was beautiful and made of
stuffs of poetry. So, he sang about the life of everyday Americans, their fields and
their follies, their leaders and their lusts, their politics and their politeness, their
lunatics and their literates.
The poet projects the picture of a happy and strong America. He finds
everything all right in the body politic as well as body social of America. He
expresses his acceptance of all kinds of people in America, with their varied
occupations and the songs they sing in their work. He makes the thought very clear
that America doesn’t belong to rich and the wealthy; rather than America is the nation
of mechanics, carpenters, masons, boatmen, deckhands, shoe-makers, hatters, woodcutters, plow-boys and the house-wives, it is these people who make what is America.
He has succeeded in presenting before us the image of America of his choice. Thus,
by the use of catalog – technique and long sweeping lines the poet has succeeded in
conveying a vivid sense of the varied, multitudinous life of America as well as the
comradeship and zest for life of the people.
He wanted to be the voice of all Americans, from Native Americans to
immigrants, from factory workers to farmers. In the twentieth century, young writers
such as Harte Crane, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac
rediscovered Whitman and reinterpreted his literary festo for younger audiences.
Allen Ginsberg begins his famous poem Supermarket in California with a reference to
Whitman:
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What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down
The streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at
the full
moon…………………………………………………………………
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among
the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What
price bananas? Are you my Angel?
(Ginsberg Allen.1980:32).
He was particularly ambitious in his wish to speak for every citizen, given the
enormous variety of backgrounds of the individuals who comprise the country. He
was clear and consistent about the inclusiveness of his expression, and Leaves of
Grass describes a multicultural nation. “The creation of a vernacular democratic has a
deeper ideological motivation, one that may be at work even in what would seem to
be the most politically innocent of Whitman’s works”(Dana Philips.1994:311). The
questions it raises, in short is whether it is the difference of all these democratic
personalities that is being
memorialized or their sameness is, what is represented in
the poem just folks or the more portentous of the folk? In reviewing his life work in
1876, he wrote;
I also sent out Leaves of Grass, to arouse and set flowing in men’s and
women’s
hearts, young and old, (my present and future readers)
endless streams of living, pulsating love and friendship, directly from
them to myself, now and ever. To this terrible, irrepressible yearning
surely more or less down underneath in most human souls this never
satisfied appetite for sympathy, and this universal democratic
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comradeship- this old, eternal, yet ever-new interchange of
adhesiveness, so fitly emblematic of America- I have that book,
undisguisedly, declared the openest expression
(Preface to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman, 1986:159-67).
Whitman said the basis of his poetry was “human fraternity, comradeship,
adding that “the idea of my book is conveyed in that one word comradeship” (Quoted
in Greenland.1992:14-15). The concept of comradeship is at heart of Walt Whitman’s
religious and moral enterprise. In the words of Mila. T. Maynard, “the circle of
Whitman’s thought finds it perfect round in the idea of comradeship”
(Maynard.1903:137).
In a verse of marked prophetic overtones placed in one of the early sections of
Leaves of Grass, Whitman announces: “I will write the evangel-poem of comrades
and of love” (Starting from Paumanok, Walt Whitman.1986:19).The messianic aura
that we find in this and in other similar verses reveal the emotional intensity he
attached to his desire to establish a new morality of comradeship. For Whitman to say
that he will write the evangel poem of comrades is only consistent with his early
references to construct a cathedral or a New Bible. The religious connotations with
which Whitman invests his ideals of comradeship are also manifest in the following
lines from his 1871 poem Gods:
Lover divine and perfect Comrade,
Waiting content, invisible yet, but certain’
Be thou my God.
Thou, thou, the Ideal Man,
Fair, able, beautiful, content, and loving,
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Complete in body and dilate in spirit,
Be thou my God
(Walt Whitman.1986:269).
The poet’s sacred ideal constitutes a clear example of the peculiar integration
of his ethics and his aesthetics. Whitman’s perfect comrades, his ideal man is, among
other things, fair, beautiful, content, and complete in body. At least on two separate
occasions, Whitman calls himself in Leaves of Grass ‘poet of comrades’(Starting
from Paumanok, and These I singing in Spring), while in In Paths Untrodden, the first
poem of Calamus cluster, he introduces the reader to the celebration of masculine
comradeship.
This beautiful conception of comradeship and the attractive forms in which
that conception is expressed in the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass that has won
for him such a warm place in the heart of most of his admirers. “In our materialistic
scientific century such a conception, based not upon its economic or other worldly
value, but expressive of the deepest needs of the human heart is unique. Since the
time of Christ, no teacher of humanity has come forward with such a pure and lofty
idea of human relations, and with the exception of Christ none has attached equal
importance to love as the greatest renovative power in human destiny” (Christian
Smuts, Jan. 1973:93).
Whitman’s conception at this stage was of his development, whereas Christ’s
concept of love seems to have a religious reference. His was that love which endured
the higher love. The disciples had to love one another, because they were all the
children of heavenly Father. The heavenly love was not the root reason of earthly
love.
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With Whitman, on the other hand, love was at this stage of his development, a
purely and frankly human relation. It had no reference to whatever to religious
considerations. “It was a human plant which under certain conditions sprang up
spontaneously in the real human heart. He calls it very significantly comradeship”
(Christian Smuts, Jan .1973:93). The section Calamus, in which this comradeship is
celebrated, follows the section ‘Children of Adam,’ in which the sexual passion is
sung. This seems to suggest- and the suggestion is explicitly borne out by what
Whitman says elsewhere- that in his mind comradeship was a higher emotion than
that of sex. To adopt this peculiar nomenclature, adhesiveness is a purer and spiritual
form of love than amativeness. While comradeship has not the same strong physical
basis in human nature as amativeness, it certainly has a great ideal basis and in that
sense is a higher emotion.
In his 1860 Calamus poems, Walt Whitman chose the metaphor of fragile
leaves to suggest not only the most naked thoughts which lie beneath his verse, but
also the bond of intimacy that links poet to reader. Fragile might the leaves have been,
but hardly too, for such is the meaning of the Calamus image – the grass which stands
firmly rooted in earth, blowing freely in the wind, delicate and defiant. “The Calamus
metaphor runs throughout Whitman’s verse from the 1860’s onward and with it the
recurring themes of the love of comrades, the bond of male love ( both erotic and
platonic ), the wonders of the human body, and the charge of young nation to cast off
the chains of conversation and celebrate the myriad of human experiences”
(Hampson, Thomas.1995:01).
Calamus poems to the integration of the love of comrades into Whitman’s
larger mystical and democratic philosophy are very much a function of the poet’s
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post- civil war thinking. In poems like the 1870 ‘O Star of France,’ where he
mentions the ‘dear love of man for his comrade’ as well as in the innumerable
citations in Democratic Vistas, Whitman increasingly demonstrates his concern to
graft onto the initial Calamus usage of ‘comrade’ the dimension of fraternal bond comrades as brothers and sisters as well as lovers and friends – and to place this
concept within the context of a truly democratic society. This revision culminates in
Whitman’s 1876 Preface to Two Rivulets, where he claims the “special meaning of
Calamus mainly resides in its political significance” (Hampson, Thomas.1995:06).
Whitman, who is known for his creative use of language, introduces the term
‘camerado’ that alternates with the more familiar ‘comrade’.
The origin of
‘camerado’ and the reasons for its alternation with comrade have been the object of
interesting study by Maria Stein. According to Stein, the word ‘camerado’ is derived
from the Spanish word ‘camarada.’ However, the words ‘comrade’ and ‘camarada,’
she points out, are not completely equivalent in meaning. Stein cites a dictionary
definition of the word ‘comrade’: “An associate in companionship of friendship, or a
close companion. As for camarada, it is derived from the word ‘camara’ which
signifies a large and / or main room in a house” (Stein, Maria.1967:123-25).
By resorting to a 1936 historical-linguistic dictionary of Spanish, we are given
the following definition of ‘camarada’: “El companero, de camera, que com eyduerme
enuna mesma posada. (someone who shares a room, eats, and sleeps at the same inn)
While Stein does not offer a literal translation of the sentence, she clarifies its
meaning by stating that a ‘camarada’ is someone who is so close to another man that
he eats and sleeps in the same house with him” (Stein, Maria.1967:123-25). From this
Stein concludes that ‘camarada’ connotes more than comrade.
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Stein believes Whitman made a conscious distinction between ‘comrade’ and
‘camarado’ based on the degree of intensity which he imbued the concept. Thus, side
by side with passages in which the poet uses the term ‘comrade,’ Stein quotes the
following lines where the word ‘camerado’ is used:
O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only.
O a word to clear one’s path ahead endlessly!
(Starting from Paumanok, Walt Whitman. 1986:19).
My Rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be
there
(Song of Myself, Walt Whitman. 1986:45).
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself?
(Song of Open Road. Walt Whitman. 1986: 15).
Camerado, this no book,
Who touches it touches a man.
(Is it night? are we together alone?)
It is I you hold and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms- decease calls me forth
(So Long, Walt Whitman. 1986:503-05).
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She concludes that the lines in which, “comrade is used are not nearly intense
as the lines in which ‘camerado’ appears that it seems Whitman uses camerado when
he wishes to communicate a kind of personal closeness and immediacy and comrade
when he is speaking generically or in reference to the idea of male friendship that is
distant from here and now and Walt Whitman” (Maria Stein.1967: 123-25).
Of the identification of Lord with Camerado in Song of Myself, Stein speculates
that, “it may be indicative of the inclusiveness and special sense of ultimate unity
which permeates Whitman’s vision of life and death. She does not believe that
Whitman meant to attain union with a personal God or ‘Camerado. Rather, the
identification of Lord with Camerado is a poetic exclamation symbolic of the
underlying complex of his thought and feeling” (Maria Stein.1967:124).
She also hypothesizes that, “Camerado suggests the mystical, perfect union of
all comrades” (Maria Stein.1967:125).
Whether or not Stein is right in her
observations, at least she succeeds in showing that the poet expresses his affection for
comrades with a varying degree of intensity, from intense (as compared to regular
feelings of same sex friendship) to the mystical.
Thomas Donaldson, one of Whitman’s personal friends and biographers,
stated in 1896 in his ‘Walt Whitman, the Man,’ that Whitman’s poems celebrating
‘love of comrades’ were written not out of actual experience but as a compensation
for his own loneliness. To this, Allen adds that Whitman put in his poems “the
passionate love of comrades for which he found human recipient” (Allen.1975:15).
Schyberg, for his part, by resorting to Freudian interpretation, concludes that “the
underlying meaning of Whitman’s idea is sexual in nature. He slightly hints also at
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the possibility of sublimation, purification (through intellectual or aesthetic means) or
sacrilization of those originally sexual feeling” (Fredrick Schyberg.1951:165).
Asselineau traces “Whitman’s exaltation of comradeship in Calamus not only
to homosexuality (which he takes for granted), but more specifically to an
unsuccessful love affair in the life of the poet” (Asselineau.1960:107-114). In
substantiating his hypothesis, he focuses on a personal crisis Whitman underwent
around the month of June of 1859. The evidence Asselineau produces consists mainly
of some intriguing annotations the poet made in his dairies, and in two poems, one of
them expressing of a love kind, and other one expressing excruciating pain and
depression.
Tanner is also of the opinion that homosexuality is what underlies Whitman’s
elevated conception of comradeship. Quoting from Whitman, he conjectures that, “the
most copious and close companionship of men must mean something more than the
traditional Christian concept of brotherly love. In fact, as mentioned earlier, he
believes that homosexuality was almost a way of life with Whitman, and concludes
that it is indeed esoteric homosexuality which Whitman calls the love of comrades”
(Tanner.1965:90-100).
To Zweig also, homosexuality constitutes the true nature of Whitman’s feeling of
comradeship. In his opinion, overwhelming sexual passion of a socially unacceptable
kind antecedes the notion of comradeship. Zweig finds the best example of
Whitman’s passional poetry in the poem entitled ‘When I Heard at the Close of the
Day.’ In that poem the poet identifies friend with lover and there is, indeed, heavy
erotic imagery. Here, Zweig sees the key to a ‘secret’ which Whitman intended to
disclose to Horace Traubel, though he never did. He believes the poet’s secret was his
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homosexuality, “here is the secret fully spoken. Whitman loves a man; he takes him to
his bed, redefines as the poet of his love. He renounces his promiscuous love affair
with the present age and becomes absorbed in a private love” (Paul Zweig.1984:301).
In Zweig’s words, “the drama of sexual love becomes the more innocuous
love of comrades” (Paul Zweig.1984:302). He finds a tendency towards abstraction in
Whitman’s writing, which culminates in his use of the chronological term
‘adhesiveness,’ which he calls “strangely bloodless and philosophical, when
compared to the poet’s fulsome expression of passion. A similar reasoning has led
other critics to conclude that the whole notion of comradeship in Whitman is a
compromise version of his homosexuality” (Paul Zweig.1984:303). He describes the
calamus grass, Whitman’s symbol for manly comradeship, as a stiff phallic plant,
being just the sort of veiled symbol that Whitman loved.
Whitman clearly used comrade in both the senses. Increasingly, though, he
began to graft onto comrade the more generalized meaning as well, especially in
Democratic Vistas, where he uses the word to indicate perfect friends bonded together
in solidarity. The military origins of the term may also account for the heightened
frequency of the image whenever Whitman talks about his Civil war experiences,
where caritas rather than eros were his motivation.
Just as Whitman, the poet, permitted his images to evolve toward a
heightened mythicism and sense of socio-political responsibility, so too, did Whitman
the prose writer, demonstrate his growing love for establishing a visionary
democracy-perhaps nowhere more vividly than in Democratic Vistas, which forms
not only the physical context for his To What You Said but, in an uncanny way, also
the intellectual framework for the unpublished poem.
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The theme of the prose tract is the moral crisis facing post – bellum America,
in the need of a new breed of teachers, workers, lovers, poets and prophets. Whitman
had been reading Carlyle’s criticism of America’s democracy, as well as steeping
himself in Shelley’s concept of poets and prophets of mankind and in Emerson and
Thoreau’s ideas that the function of the government is neither repression nor law but
the training of communities to begin and end with the individual. In Democratic
Vistas the poet speaks as the reformer; he talks frequently of liberating men and
women from the “fossil and unhealthy air which hangs around the parlors, he calls for
fresh sanity in literature – America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, all –
surrounding and comical as she is herself” (Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman.1892).
Then from that political-social premise, Whitman moves upward to the
increasingly metaphysical, only the mightiest original, non – subordinated soul can
ever really lead, and he speaks of the soul as the creator of literature. But in typical
Whitmanesque fashion, he opts for a poetry that stretches toward the ether while also
remaining rooted in flesh: he advocates the “intense and loving comradeship, the
personal passionate attachment of man to man as the profound savior of the nation. I
say democracy infers such loving comradeship as its most inevitable twin and he
expands the ‘one – to – one’ into a ‘one – to – all’ relationship in which the races are
comrades and fraternizing all…. in solidarity”(Hampson Thomas.1995: 07).
Whitman’s emphasis shifted in the years between Calamus and Democratic
Vistas; he moves from the erotic celebrations of fleshy love in Children of Adam, and
the intimate and personal qualities of Calamus to a far more idealistic, pan world
vision of love. Finally, “the Calamus poems are rarely addressed to anyone specific;
in these poems the love of comrades, however personally inspired by individuals it
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may have been, is most often addressed to shadowy, unnamed lovers”(Hampson
Thomas.1995:07).This is not the case with To What You Said with its apostrophic
form. This is precisely the direction of the poet’s revising in To What You Said.
Further, the tone of the poem, though gentle in its opening, grows militantly
aggressive in its middle section, proclaiming the poem’s affinities to the missionary
fervor of Democratic Vistas. All of these factors suggest that the poetic voices of
Democratic Vistas and To What You Said derive from the same period and spiritual
source. Into both works, Whitman has plunged his own erotic, personal – even
narcissistic – love of comrades from his Calamus days into the crucible of the Civil
War and has emerged with a new kind of awareness. In Whitman’s poetry from the
1870’s and 1880’s the love of comrades encompasses not only emotional and sexual
attachment but also the ideals of charity and democracy. Central to the poet’s
definition of democracy is what he called Personalism or the interplay of the
individual with the aggregate society.
Calamus poems appeared so conspicuously in the edition of 1860 and the
theme they express began to seem to Whitman the second theme of his primary
themes – the other being individualism and religion. He said this most plainly, as it
happens, in a preface which he wrote toward the end of the War for a possible English
edition of Leaves of Grass. The idea of sovereignty of the individual, he observed,
“isolates, for the reasons, each separate man and woman in the world; - while the idea
of Love fuses and combines the whole. Out of fusing of these twain opposite as they
are, I seek to a homogenous Song” (Newton Arvin.1969: 271). And, from 1867
onwards, his book was open with these lines which read:
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One’s – self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En – masse
(Walt Whitman.1986:01).
Surely it is not meaningless that the word Democratic should be associated
here rather with the idea of union than with the idea of separateness. He revealed it,
for example, in much pondered pages of Democratic Vistas. “Not that half only,
individualism, which isolates, there is another half, which is adhesiveness, or love,
that fuses or ties and aggregates, making
the races comrades, and fraternizing all”
(Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman.1892). The great word ‘Solidarity’ has arisen.
Here, Whitman was speaking not only of union and separatism in general but of the
problem of nationalism and internationalism; yet his language has a larger application.
It was in highly personal language that he sang this emotion, and the images
found for it are sometimes singular ones - images of two boys “together clinging, of
dauntless and rude men touching face to face lightly, of parting friends embracing
each other ardently. The special meaning of the Calamus cluster of Leaves of Grass,
he wrote in one of his prefaces, mainly resides in its political significance” (Arvin
Newton.1969:273). Indeed he believed that, essentially, no other bond than this bond
of sentiment and emotion would effectually unify the society of the future.
For a long time this gospel of comradeship was accepted as its face value by
Whitman’s disciples: later it was drastically challenged. “It was challenged by the
German writer, Eduard Bertz, who had begun as an enthusiastic Whitmanite; it was
challenged by the English physician, W. C. Rivers; and more recently Mr. Mark Van
Doren has pointed out what Whitman half consciously meant by ‘manly attachment’
was not simply a normal brotherly feeling among men but homosexual love: it was
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the unwitting expression of his own abnormal sexuality, and as such has no serious
meaning certainly no serious political meaning for healthy men and women. His
democratic dogmas, since they base themselves on this eccentric and unwholesome
emotion this wateriest of foundations for democracy – are wholly without meaning,
wholly invalid, for the men of to – day and of the future. No society can be made out
of him, says Mr. Van Doren of Whitman. We could not be like if we would. He
revealed himself to us, and that is all” (Newton Arvin.1969: 274).
Does this mean, however, that Whitman’s whole prophecy as a democratic
poet and especially as the poet of ‘universal democratic comradeship’is invalidated by
having its psychological basis in a sexual aberration? Not, surely, unless the personal
origin of political, ethical, philosophical ideas in general is to be taken as the test of
their validity. It is hardly customary, and it would be uncritical, to dispose of the ideas
in The Republic, because there is a homosexual strain in Plato, and homosexuality is
only one of the eccentrics or pathologies that may give a particular bias to a writer’s
work.
.
It is quite possible that, even if we ignore the personal, eccentric basis of
Whitman’s democratic comradeship, and concentrate on the poetic teaching itself, we
should feel that this teaching had been somehow colored and warped by the poet’s
personality in a way that kept it from being available to men in general as it ought to
be.
“Whitman was no mere invert, no mere case; he remained to the end, in
almost every real and visible sense, a sweet and sane human being a human being
who had proved himself capable of easy and genial friendship with hundreds of
ordinary people” (Newton Arvin.1969:277). Leaves of Grass, as a gospel poem of
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genuine fraternity is far from standing or falling on the pieces in the Calamus group
alone. It is not in these poems, in any case, that Whitman’s principle of comradeship
is more significantly and validly expressed; it would be preposterous to speak as if the
communal strain in Leaves of Grass were exhausted by pieces like Scented Herbage
of My Breast and To a Western Boy.
The new ethics of comradeship that Whitman envisages is fueled by intense
feelings of manly attachment. The poet does not spell out his new morality in a
systematic way. Rather, in a typically messianic fashion, he teaches a principle and
presents his own life as an example of how to implement it in practice. It is
passionate, non-sexual (or at least non-genital) love between males that constitutes the
essence of Whitman’s new morality. ‘The passionate love of comrades,’ as he calls it,
finds its proper expression in certain rituals, such as kissing on the lips:
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss or the new husband’s kiss,
For I am the new husband and I am the comrade
(Whoever You Are Holding Now Me in Hand, Walt Whitman.
1986:115-16).
Yet comes one a Manhattanese and evermat parting kisses me lightly
on the lips with robust love,
And on the crossing of the street or on the ship’s deck give a kiss in
return,
We observe that salute of American comrades’ land and sea
(Behold This Swarthy Face, Walt Whitman .1986:126).
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Besides kissing, holding hands is another ritual that gives expression to the
morality of comradeship:
O camerado close! O you and me at last and us two only.
O a word to clear one’s path ahead endlessly!
O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
O now I triumph – and you shall also;
O hand in hand- O wholesome pleasure –O one more desirer and
Lover,
O to haste firm holding-to haste, haste on with me
(Starting from Paumanok, Walt Whitman.1986:19).
In the rituals of kissing and holding hands which were actually practiced among
Whitman’s disciples. Binns sees more than mere sentimentality. “He sees in it an
expression of the warmth of manly comradeship that needs to be witnessed” (Henry
Bryan Binns.1905:165). Others interpret these rituals as a touch of rebellion against
decrees of society, as an attempt to free oneself from the irrational fear of gender
confusion, from the idea that aggressiveness is reserved for the male and tenderness
for the female. Justin Kaplan sees “Whitman as a precursor of the men’s liberation
movement, since in his opinion, the poet was claiming for men the right to express
feelings the way women do. Whitman believed he was doing neither more nor less
than claiming for men the emotional freedom and physical expressiveness-holding
hands, touching, hugging, kissing-that society allowed women to enjoy with each
other”(Justin- Kaplan.1980:183).
Among the orthodox, that is, non-sexual interpretations of Whitman’s concept of
comradeship, that of Henry Binns in his A Life of Walt Whitman (1905), is interesting
75
because of the extensive attention, he devotes to the subject. Binns maintains that
while in sex Whitman found that Life wherein we are one, comradeship, a passion as
intense as that of sex, Whitman beheld as the relation between spiritual bodies. Binns
seems to have been well aware of a tendency to read homosexuality in Whitman’s
poems of comradeship, as he warns the reader that “the noblest of passions is the most
liable to basic misunderstandings. He associates life and death with sex and
comradeship respectively. Sex passion finds its proper expression in physical rites, it
is the passion of the life in Time; on the contrary, and the passion of comrades is of
eternity and only finds expression in Death. This appears to have been Whitman’s
conviction” (Henry Bryan Binns.1905:167).
The poet of comradeship, who exalted brotherly love as the kelson of creation,
would naturally gather about him a comitatus of devoted adherents. He foresaw this
early before the group began to gather, when he warned his future readers to be wary
of what his friends would say of him:
I call to the world to distrust the accounts of my friends, but listen to
my enemies, as I myself do.
I charge you forever reject those who would expound me for I cannot
expound myself,
I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me,
I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free
(Whitman Quoted in Holloway, Emory.1938: 220).
By interspersing the original twelve poems of Live Oak with Moss among the
poems of a more public nature, “Whitman sought to reconnect his private homosexual
feeing with the public culture of democracy. And yet like Proto Leaf, the Calamus
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poems are Janus faced, expressing a separatist impulse toward a private homosexual
order at the same time that they invoke a national and global community of
democratic brotherhood”(Betsy Erkkila.1989:179). This split is evident in the poem In
Paths Untrodden, in which Whitman announces a new direction in his verse:
In paths untrodden,
In the growth by margin of ponds-waters,
Escaped from the life that exhibits itself,
From all standards hitherto published – from the pleasures,
profits conformities,
Which too long I was suffering to feed to my Soul;
Clear to me now, standards not yet published clear to me that my Soul,
That the Soul of the man I speak for, feeds, rejoices only in
comrades
(In Paths Untrodden, Walt Whitman.1986:112-13).
The new path Whitman travels is away from the material culture of democracy
–from pleasures, profits, and conformities- toward a more spiritual order of
democratic comradeship and love. Altering the individualistic emphasis of his earlier
poems. “Whitman resolves to sing no songs today but those of manly attachment . . . .
. Bequeathing, hence, types of athletic love. But the poet’s escape to the margins of
77
pond-waters, the site of Calamus growth, is also poetic coming out. Escaped from the
life that exhibits itself, Whitman resolves to publish the yet- unpublished standard of
homosexual love. Alone, away from the clank of the world, he hints at something
secretive, exclusive, and hitherto unuttered by his culture” (BetsyErkkila.1989:179).
“No longer abashed for in this secluded spot I can respond as would not dare
elsewhere” (Walt Whitman.1986:112-13). Whitman’s psychosocial split between
homosexual poet and poet of democracy is inscribed in the concluding lines:
Afternoon, this delicious Ninth Month, in my forty first years,
I proceed, for all who are, or have been, young men,
To tell the secrets of my nights and days,
To celebrate the need of comrades
(Walt Whitman.1986:113).
Placing himself in the service of Democracy ma femme, “Whitman announces
his intent to twist and intertwist the states by circulating new friendship throughout
the land. Affection shall solve everyone of the problems of freedom, he observes. The
problems of freedom to which he refers are the same as those encountered by the
framers of the Constitution: how to ensure a maximum of freedom without inviting
either tyranny of the majority or tyranny of the State” (Betsy, Erkkila.1989:180).
What the founding fathers sought to do through an appeal to republican virtue, the
poet seeks to do by arousing by the bonds of comradeship and love:
I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands
(For You O Democracy, Walt Whitman.1986: 117).
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In this and other poems of the cluster, Whitman moves away from the pond
side and back to the centre of American culture , legitimizing his calamus emotions as
a part of public culture of democracy and as a means of welding the divided nation.
His comrades and lovers become in effect republican in the affectionate dress of
phrenological adhesiveness.
Whitman internalized the homophobia of his culture. His moments of selfpersecution and self-doubt fed, and were fed by his growing doubts about the whole
democratic enterprise. Blurring the bounds between personal and political, he
experienced his homosexual desire as a putatively healthy and democratic order. The
real democracy of uncloseted sexual feeling between men was still that yet unfound of
the poet who faced west from California’s shores.
As in Out of the Cradle, Whitman’s personal tale of love and loss in Calamus
was bound up with the tale of national loss. In another poem, Of Him I Love Day and
Night appears to be the death of a real or fantasy lover:
Of him I love day and night, I dreamed I heard he was dead,
And I dreamed I went where they had buried him I love- but he was not
in that place,
And I dreamed I wandered, searching among burial- places, to
find him
(Walt Whitman.1986:445-46).
But in a passage that anticipates the Unreal City of Eliot’s Waste Land, the
poet’s dream turns out to be the death of the nation:
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And I found that every place is a burial-place,
The houses full of life were equally full of death,
(This house is now,)
The streets, the shipping, the places of amusement, the Chicago,
Boston, Philadelphia, the Mannahatta, were as full of the dead
as of The living,
And fuller, O vastly fuller, of the dead than of the living
(Walt Whitman.1986:445-46).
Like Lincoln’s 1858 reference to the nation as a house divided, Whitman’s
parenthetical reference to the death of ‘This house now’ has a national resonance: The
loss of the poet’s comrade and lover comes to figure the loss of America and
ultimately of democracy itself.
The Calamus cluster is Whitman’s most radical sequence personally and
politically in both what it reveals and what it conceals. By placing his personal love
poems in a more public, democratic frame and by his ambiguous use of the compact
you, Whitman has it both ways: He is at once the poet of homosexual love and the
bard of democracy. As the title of his opening poem suggests, Whitman travelled in
paths untrodden, inscribing homosexuality-the affection of man for man and the
condition of his poetic utterance is of democracy itself. His Calamus sequence is
doubly revolutionary: He infuses the abstractions of democracy with the intensity of
erotic passion, giving literature some of its first and most potent images of
‘democratic comradeship’; and by linking homoeroticism with a democratic breaking
of bounds, he presents one of the most moving and tender account of homosexual
love in Western literature.
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Whitman’s great opportunity to practice comradeship materialized during the
Civil War, while working as a volunteer nurse at the Washington hospitals. There, he
consoled the young soldiers, whom he caressed and kissed. “The war hospitals turned
out to be the ideal scenario for the rituals of comradeship is no mere accident, as it is
perfectly consistent with the marginality of friendship hypothesis. War hospitals
constitute the perfect example of a situation that would allow for marginal behaviors,
to take place among males” (Horace, Traubel. 1908:168-70).
The author of Leaves of Grass celebrated not only the love for a woman, the
subject of innumerable works by thousands of poets, but also ‘manly love’. It is true
that he called his friends lovers. It is true that he did not speak of comradely love in
abstract or commonplace terms, but in words palpitating with tenderness. The poet
was capable of comradely feelings of rare intensity. The first reading of A Song for
Occupations begins like this:
Come closer to me,
Push closer my lovers and takes the best I possess,
Yield closer and closer and give me the best you possess
(A Song for Occupations, Walt Whitman.1986:621).
But it is A Song for Occupations which demonstrates more clearly than any
other of Whitman’s works that the poet’s call to his ‘lovers’ to yield closer has a
social character. At the center of the poem stand Workmen and Workwomen,
mechanics and farmers. The author demands equality for all and affirms the worth of
every working man. Is it you that thought the President greater than you? And this
feeling of the magnificence of every person engaged in useful work of every member
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of the human race, he expresses in a form which may be unusual and ecstatic, but is
unquestionably noble and expressive: the image of people in love with each other.
Addressing the reader, the poet exclaims: . . . .I am in love with You and -a
highly significant addition- with all my fellows upon the earth. Emerson, who was
obviously shocked by what he saw as an excessively open treatment of love between
man and woman in Whitman’s works, saw nothing shameful in his poems about
‘manly love.’ At times Emerson himself called his comrades lovers. Whitman made
more friends in the hospitals of Washington than anywhere else, and he expressed his
love for these soldier-friends in a large number of poems and letters.
In several poems which were probably written after his move to Washington,
Whitman speaks of crowds, groups of forms on the floor and death-spasm. But he did
not restrict himself to the horrors of war. Even in the most tragic scenes one always
senses the poet’s awareness of man’s might and heroism. Never before had Whitman
expressed with such simplicity and power- his feelings, his perturbation and shock.
In the poem Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night we find the image of
a brave soldier who has perished in battle, the image of ‘my son and my comrade’.
The body of the dead soldier, bathed by the rising sun comes to symbolize
immortality of a life which has been illuminated by a heroic deed. As almost
everywhere in Whitman’s poetry, the heroic is seen through the eyes of a lyric poet.
There is sensitive lyricism, for instance, in the inscription on the tomb of the soldier
who has been buried somewhere in the woods of Virginia, bold, cautious, true, and
my loving comrade. (in the poem. As Toilsome I Wander’d Virginia’s Woods)
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During the war Whitman wrote a short poem which tells of the arrival in camp
of a tan-faced prairie-boy. These lines are directly related to the poet’s pre-war poems
about the bonds of comradeship and manly love.
Before you came to camp came many a welcome gift,
Praises and presents came and nourishing food, till at last among the
recruits,
You came, taciturn, with nothing to give— we but look’d on each
other,
When lo! More than all the gifts of the world you gave me
(Of Tan Faced Prairie Boy, Walt Whitman.1986:320).
The poet, of course, had always been able to love people passionately and
gently, but the mighty wind of history was needed to fan the sparks of humanism into
a blazing fire. We know that his world-view had a strong, even militantly
individualistic cast. In Song of Myself he said, for instance:
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary...
(Song of Myself, Walt Whitman.1986:41).
Whitman’s great goodness of heart allowed him to echo loudly the most
beautiful music known to mankind, the music of brotherhood, the call to collectivism.
The great principle of mutual comradely aid, of working-men’s unity and brotherly
love is expressed in Whitman’s poetry with immense artistic force in Song of Myself
we read:
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The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections . . and
further on: Adjourning myself to bestow myself on the first that will
take me,
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
Scattering it freely forever
(Song of Myself, Walt Whitman.1986:41).
Whitman indeed freely scatters his lavish love. In Song of the Open Road he
addresses the reader with the following words:
Camerado I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself . . . .
“Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my
poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you
(Song of the Open Road, Walt Whitman 1986:158-59).
Whitman sings of the joys of human love and friendship in dozens of poems.
The coming of a friend is worth more than glory and success, he says in the poem
When I Heard at the Close of the Day (1860): When I caroused, or when my plans
were accomplished, still I was not happy, he writes. But when my dear friend my
lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy. In one poem after another
Whitman offers his friendship to any human being he meets. What genuine warmth
there is in such words in the poem To You,
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Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should
You not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?
(To You, Walt Whitman.1860:14).
In a longer poem also entitled To You (1856) Whitman addresses a passer-by:
I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you,
None has understood you, but I understand you,
None has done justice to you; you have not done justice to yourself,
None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you,
None but would subordinate you; I only am he who will never consent
to subordinate you . . . .
(To You, Walt Whitman.1860:14).
Later in the poem the real meaning of the dedication To You is made still
clearer. In affirming the worthiness and nobility of all decent people, Whitman is
prepared to paint a nimbus of gold-colored light around any man who is really a man
En-Masse:
Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of
all,
From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of goldcolor’d light.
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of
gold-color’d light . . . .
(To You, Walt Whitman.1860:14).
85
Whitman’s dream of a society bound together in comradeship is disclosed in a
number of works in a very frankly publicist manner. He is echoing utopian-socialist
ideas in the image of the new city of Friends, in the poem I Dream’d in a Dream:
I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the
whole of the rest of the earth,
I dream’d that was the new city of Friends,
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the
rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words
(I Dream’d in a Dream, Walt Whitman.1986:133).
The social meaning of the new city of Friends is even more generalized in the Song of
the Broad-Axe
Where the city of the faithful friends stands,
Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,
Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands,
Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands,
There the great city stands
(Song of the Broad-Axe, Walt Whitman.1986:190).
In the poem The Base of Metaphysics the poet says that the meaning of all
philosophical systems, their very essence is:
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The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to
friend,
Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents, of city
for city and land for land
(The Base of Metaphysics, Walt Whitman.1986:121).
In the poem Gods the ideal man is characterized as ‘my God.’ This man is
Lover divine and perfect Comrade. He is
. . . fair, able, beautiful, content, and loving,
Complete in body and dilate in spirit . . . .
(Gods, Walt Whitman.1986:269).
It is true that in the poem Starting from Paumanok the poet says, I will effuse
egotism,’ and promises to make the poem of evil also, but for the most part he
glorifies ‘companionship,’ the ideal of ‘manly love.’ The poem ends with these
characteristic lines:
O camerado close! O you and me last, and us two only . . . .
O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
O now I triumph—and you shall also;
O hand in hand – O wholesome pleasure – O one more desirer and
lover!
O to haste firm holding – to haste, haste on with me
(Starting from Paumanok, Walt Whitman.1986:28).
The author of Leaves of Grass did not portray men and women as mere
embodiments of abstract noble qualities. He saluted people who were like himself,
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turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding. In ordinary men, alive and
warm, absolutely real, not truncated or distilled, full of strength and yearning for joy,
he found spiritual wealth, an ocean of love. The poet believed that people could feel
inexhaustible sympathy for others.
What a great poet Whitman is; great like a great Greek. For him the last
enclosures have fallen, he finds himself on the shores of the last sea. His another
poem Scented Herbage of My Breast, the lyric is a chant, celebrating the love of
comrades, a love beautiful in extreme, a love which represents the ultimate in human
life, love which has no ulterior motives, as procreation or the continuance of the
human race, as in the case with the love between man and woman. It is a great
celebration of the love of comrades; a celebration which the poet hoped will be the
reverberation throughout the states.
It is through the love of comrades that great new era of democracy would be
established and it is the poet’s responsibility to bring about the establishing of such a
democracy. It would be established on the perfect circuits of vital flow between
human beings. First, the great sexless normal relation between individuals’ simple
sexless friendships, union of family, and clan, and nation, and group. Next, the
powerful sex relation between man and woman, culminating in the eternal orbit of
marriage and finally the sheer friendship, the love between the comrades, the manly
love which alone can create a new era of life. The one state however does not cancel
the other, it fulfills the other. Marriage the great step beyond friendship, and family
and nationality, is also celebrated by the poet.
The ultimate comradeship which sets about to destroy marriage destroys its
own reason. It is the last seedless flower of pure beauty beyond its purpose. But if it
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destroys marriage, it makes itself purely death. In its beauty, the ultimate comradeship
flowers on the brink of death. But it flowers from the root of all life upon the
blossoming tree of life.
“If marriage is sacred the ultimate comradeship is utterly sacred, since it has
no ulterior motive, whatever, like procreation. If marriage is eternal, the great bond of
life, how much more in this bond eternal, being the great life circuit which borders on
death in all its round. The new, the extreme, the sacred relationship of comrades await
us, and the future of mankind depends on the way in which this relation is entered
upon by us. It is a relation between fearless, honorable, self-responsible men, a
balance in perfect polarity” (D.H.Lawrence, Quoted from Walt Whitman, 1986: 61618).
The ideal of manly comradeship is the fundamental ideological element of
Whitman’s messianic project. Whitman surrounds the concept of comradeship with a
religious aura right from the start, when he declares that, he “will write the evangel of
comrades” (Starting from Paumanok, WW.1986:06). But without doubt, the
sacrilization of the idea of comradeship takes place in 1860 poems entitled To Him
That Was Crucified, where the poet repeatedly addresses Christ as comrade, sets
himself on the same plane as Christ, and identifies his own messianic enterprise with
that of Jesus. This is a poem that deserves to be quoted in its entirety, as the emerging
picture is particularly meaningful for our discussion:
My spirit to yours dear brother,
Do not mind because many sounding your name do not
Understand you,
I do not sound your name, but I understand you,
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We few equals indifferent of lands, indifferent of times,
We, enclosers of all continents, all castes, allowers of all
theologies,
Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of
races, ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers as we
are
(To Him That Was Crucified, Walt Whitman.1986:384-85).
Echoing perhaps Emerson’s Divinity School Address, Whitman admits Christ
into the society of the supermen, but only as an equal to the poet himself and the other
supermen. The idea, later developed by Bucke in Cosmic Consciousness is also
present in this poem that these superior individuals have surfaced in all ages and
places. Still, the most interesting aspect of the poem is the poet’s identification with
Christ as brethren and lovers, and as comrades. In our previous analysis of the nature
of Whitman’s concept of comradeship, such identification of Christ by the poet as
brother, comrade, and lover is suggestive of a number of possibilities.
As we saw, Kuebrich develops a strictly religious interpretation of Whitman’s
ideal of manly comradeship, which excludes as irrelevant psychoanalytical
interpretations of the notion of comradeship. To him, “the poet’s ideal of comradeship
is to be understood within a purely religious framework of reference. In other words,
he thinks that comradeship is all Whitman’s religion is about. To him, the love of
comrades provides “the existential basis and ultimate fulfillment of his faith”
(Kuebrich David: 2007:27). Whitman’s religion is, then, the religion of comradeship.
One is more than inclined to agree with him on this point.
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Comradeship was for Whitman more than a purely spiritual or a private
interpersonal experience. In Leaves of Grass and in his prose writings, Whitman
repeatedly expresses his belief that comradeship will have important social and
political dimensions. In his preface to the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass, he states
that the special meaning of the Calamus cluster resides in his political significance. It
is by fervent development of comradeship, he writes that the United States of the
future are to be most effectually welded together, intercalated, and annealed into a
living union.
Comradeship, Whitman defines “as the beautiful and sane affection of man for
man, latent in all the young fellows, north and south, east and west, and, as we saw
earlier, as the passionate attachment of man to man”(Walt Whitman.1986).There is
clearly an eschatological vision in Whitman’s religion of comradeship. In Symonds’s
1893 book Walt Whitman: A Study, “The love of comrades is a main factor in human
life, a virtue upon which society will have to lay its firm foundations, and a passion
equal in permanence, superior in spirituality, to the sexual affection. Comradeship is
professed to be an indispensable civic virtue with a role in the individual’s life
superior to that of sexuality”(Symonds.1893:68). This British disciple of Whitman
also emphasizes the point that Whitman does not conceive of comradeship as a
merely personal possession. Rather, he says, Whitman regards it eventually as a social
and political virtue. Symonds concludes, “This human emotion is destined to cement
society and to render commonwealths inviolable” (Symonds.1893:79).
It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that
fervid comradeship (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative
love hitherto possessing imaginative literature if not going beyond it),
that I look for the counterbalance and off set of our materialistic and
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vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof. Many
will say it is a dream, and will not follow my inferences; but I
confidently expect a time when there will be seen, running like a halfhid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests
of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and
sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto .Unknown—not
only
giving
tone
to
individual
character,
and
making
it
unprecedentedly emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but having
the deepest relations to general politics. I say democracy infers such
loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without
which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating
itself (Walt Whitman.1964:415).
It is to comradeship and not to institutions that Whitman looks for a political
redemption. “He will bind America indissolubly together into the fellowship of his
friends. Their friendship shall be called after him, and in his name they shall solve all
the problems of Freedom, and bring America to victory. Lovers are the strength of
Liberty, comrades perpetuate Equality America will be established above disaster by
the love of her poet’s lovers” (Henry Bryan Binns.1905:163).
“Whitman saw Democracy as a fluid, lawless, yet orderly exchange of feelings
among ‘comrades,’ a network of intimacies on a vast scale” (Paul Zweig, 1984 .191).
So that in Whitman’s mind, democracy could only succeed as an unimpeded flow of
love of which the poet would give the first example with the open manifestation of his
true feelings. Martin explores his idea to the point of comparing Whitman to Hegel as
a political thinker, as both appear to have seen a connection between the organization
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of sexuality, marriage and the subordination of women. He concludes that,
“Whitman’s ideal society requires socialism, democracy and homosexuality” (Robert
Martin1979:.21).
A tension is present in Whitman’s politico-mystical ideology between narrow
nationalism and universalism. At times, “Whitman appears to believe that the United
States is the supreme outcome of the evolution of the world, while other times we find
a wider, more universalistic perspective, possibly indicating, in Asselineau’s opinion,
an evolution from the one to the other” (Stavrou.1964:66). While it is true that the
idea of international brotherhood is present in Passage to India with a markedly
mystical tone, it is more than dubious that the hypothesis of an evolution in the poet’s
ideology from nationalism to universalism can be substantiated, in view of the vibrant
nationalism that runs through the lines of his 1876 and 1880 Prefaces to Leaves of
Grass, and Two Rivulets. In the latter poem, we find the most fervent association of
comradeship with narrow nationalism.
Whitman found in ‘comradeship’ an intensely personal and tragic experience,
the ‘scented herbage’ of his breast and preferred it to the outworn and overworked
cliche, fraternity. His overwhelming spirit of manly love is an alternately personal and
universal bond which tended to become more and more abstract as he grew in years;
the culmination of the abstraction is Whitman calling God Himself ‘the Comrade
Perfect’ in ‘Passage to India.’ No doubt, Whitman universalized and spiritualized a
personal experience which he called love or affection binding all men together:
There shall from me be a new friendship- It shall be called after
name,
It shall circulate through The States, indifferent of place,
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my
It shall twist and intertwist them through and around each otherCompact shall they be, showing new signs,
Affection shall solve every one of the problems of freedom,
Those who love each other shall be invincible,
They shall finally make America, completely victorious, in my name
(Walt Whitman.1986:315-16).
During his decline, his attachment to the idea of brotherhood of man became
movingly spiritual. Whitman saw personalism and manly love as the two sides of the
same token- the one distinguished man from man and the other fused them into a
family. With religious sanction discovered by the poet for individualism and
comradeship, they became noble principles. The conversion of a personal experience
into a universal doctrine throws some light on the process of transformation of the
man Whitman into a poet-prophet.
Celebrating an ideal of manly love in both its spiritual and physical aspects,
Walt Whitman has exerted a profound and enduring influence on gay literature.
Whitman's later revisions play down the homosexual associations of this tale, creating
a second bed and changing close knit love to friendship. The story highlights several
of the concerns that would run throughout Whitman's career, including the affiliation
to moral reform, which was, in the American 1840s, an integral part of political
reform.
What was lacking in America, he believed, was a religious and moral faith in
democratic values. And it was the function of the writer and the artist to help in
creating this faith by clothing it in symbolical and mythological embodiments that
would capture the imagination. Democracy, for Whitman, did not mean individualism
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alone. It included individuality, the pride and centripetal isolation of a human being
by himself; but it included also equality, the leveler, and the unfeilding principle of
the average. These two principles were “confronting and ever modifying the other,
often clashing, paradoxical, yet neither of highest avail without the other” (William.
Fisher.1970:32). They could be reconciled only by the third element in the
revolutionary trinity, the principle of fraternity, manly love of comrades. Whitman
fused the ethical and the political by promising a great democracy based on the
indissoluble ties of comradeship:
We can conclude that this chapter conveys the message that comradeship to
Whitman, was to be the very foundation of the American democratic society of the
future and it flowed from the very depths of the human personality after long waiting
for full-blooded expression by the poet. It was to bring not only man closer to man but
also America to the rest of the world whose future lay in democracy. It was an
inevitable bond experimented by Whitman in his poetry that truly brought men of all
nations, castes, and creeds into a single fraternity of spirits. Hence, Loving
comradeship was for Whitman the essential keystone of American democracy, and its
celebration was the main purpose of both his writings and personal life. In so far as
he made this principle a reality, he may be said to have supplied what was lacking in
the original Transcendentalist doctrine and to have surmounted the pessimism of
writers like Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.
It is not surprising that Whitman made democracy the central concern of his
literary vision. He was, in a sense, a political operative long before he became an
innovative poet. It would be misleading, however, to suggest that Whitman’s choice
of democracy as poetic material derived merely from a preoccupation with politics. In
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the early nineteenth century, the curiosity of democracy was a widespread concern. It
inspired nearly as much popular discussion as democratic politics. And to discuss
democratic theory was to discuss America. When Whitman wrote that he used
‘America and democracy as convertible terms,’ he was articulating an assumption
widely shared in both the United States and Europe. Whitman’s programme of culture
was a significant amendment to his democratic thought. It wove connections among
the multitude of meanings Whitman ascribed to democracy
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