Walt Whitman One Major Theme in Whitman

Walt Whitman

One major theme in Whitman is what he frankly refers to as "the love of comrades…the manly love of comrades." (Whitman, "A Song"). Although Walt Whitman is frequently but inaccurately claimed as a "gay" poet -- even though Leaves of Grass was published decades before the words "gay" or "homosexual" had entered the English lexicon -- it is clear that the role this plays in his writing is political. Whitman wrote in a country that was still a democratic experiment: "Song of Myself" predates the U.S. Civil War, which nearly caused the utter failure of that democratic experiment.

As we live in a historical moment when we can witness the struggles of democracy worldwide, it is particularly interesting to consider Whitman's emotional (and possibly even sexual) commitment to the idea of democracy. Maire Mullins notes that Whitman made great use of the contemporary pseudoscience of phrenology, the practice of generalizing about human character by reading the shape of the skull. (In 2013 phrenology has had a moment in pop culture, when Leonardo DiCaprio delivers a phrenological monologue in the Tarantino film "Django Unchained." ) But for Whitman, phrenology was used to describe an instinctive feeling towards democracy, which was almost sexualized. As Mullins writes, "Whitman borrowed from phrenology two terms, 'amativeness' to signal love between men and women, and 'adhesiveness' to signal deep friendship…Although some phrenologists had also used the term to refer to male/male friendship, this meaning would be more fully developed and advanced by Whitman" (Mullins 2009, p171).

In some sense, Whitman is using phrenology to describe a homoerotic bonding which he sees as essential to democracy: "adhesiveness" is what the poet, or any man, should feel for his "camerado." In some sense, Whitman is attempting to bridge the complex emotional currents between what a young male in 2013 means when he refers to someone as his "bro" and what the French revolutionaries meant in 1789 when they included 'fraternite" as a democratic ideal. Even though the sensuality and physicality of Whitman's imagination makes comradeship a profoundly erotic idea, the real point is centrality to the democratic experiment. "Adhesiveness" is the shared affection of man for man that is the foundation of democracy -- Whitman even relies on a pseudoscience that makes it instinctual, as though people had an instinct for egalitarian democracy.

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Whitman's democratic ideal of comradeship is, of course, intimately related to the form of his poetry. We associate Whitman with the long line, which has the cadence of unrhymed Biblical poetry, but more importantly of a human voice -- Whitman's lines often seem to be so long because the poet is taking a deep breath, and then chanting the line for as long as that breath holds out. But these long lines are, of course, uniquely suited to the rich catalogues of Whitman's verse. As an example we can see the description of the grass in Leaves of Grass:

Growing among black folks as among white,

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. (Whitman, "A Child Said, What Is the Grass")

In antebellum America, this indication of racial equality was radical. But at the same time, the catalogue is even more varied: a "Kanuck" is a Canadian (where there had never been slavery), a "Tuckahoe" is a Southern slaveowner, and "Cuff" is a term derived from Paul Cuffee, an African-American abolitionist. This was in a period when Congressmen did little but argue over the institution of slavery. For Whitman, this deep (and anti-democratic) rift in American public life is bridged by the egalitarianism of the poet -- he can feel a bond with all men.