Whitman and Homosexuality Essay - 3150 Words

Whitman and Homosexuality While responses to Whitmans poetry have always been diverse in some ways, the interpretations of his homosexuality can be divided into three stages. In general terms, Whitmans earliest critics tried to deny Whitmans deviance; later critics accepted his homosexuality yet framed it as a marginalized truth; and contemporary critics have exploded in response to these years of oppression, outing Whitman in loud declarations of his intense feelings for men. In 1914, Basil de Selincourt in his work, Walt Whitman: A Critical Study, fights desperately against the homosexual innuendos and imagery in the Calamus poems, failing to name directly, in the process, that of which he is trying to prove†¦show more content†¦Whereas in reality Whitmans life appears to have been remarkable for its manliness and cleanness; and his greatest aim was to give his fellow a helping hand in the direction of purity(30). This work was among the first defenders of Whitmans sexual material, the very issue that Whitman himself thought to be the most misunderstood aspect of his work. Trimble, however, while attempting to exonerate Whitmans overt sexual references, limits his study only to the Children of Adam poems, never once mentioning ...two boys together clinging, one the other never leaving or any of the Calamus poems for that matter. Amongst later critics in the second era of Whitman criticism, Henry Seidel Canbys Walt Whitman: An American, published in 1941, does what many of his contemporaries do to Whitmans homosexuality: spiritualize it, marginalize it, and delete it from the relevance it plays in the comradeship of a true democracy While Canby does indeed admit the fact that Whitman was homosexual, he reconfigures Whitmans various well-known, male-male relationships as something transcending the sexual and cohering more to the concept of paternalism. In the aforementioned work, Canby describ es Whitman as: an intermediate in sex...Such men are veryShow MoreRelatedThe Most Uneven Great Poet By Tenney Nathanson1102 Words   |  5 Pagespleas’d smile I may keep on, Ever and ever yet the verses owning – as, first, I here and now, Singing for Soul and Body, set to them my name, Walt Whitman Walt Whitman, termed â€Å"America’s most uneven great poet† by Tenney Nathanson, is one of America’s greatest poets. Born in 1819 in Long Island, Whitman lived during an era when sexuality, especially homosexuality, a term not coined until years later, was a taboo subject not to be discussed in public. Many of his poems centered on his private and publicRead More References to Homosexuality in Walt Whitmans Song of Myself1210 Words   |  5 PagesReferences to Homosexuality in Walt Whitmans Song of Myself WHITMAN WAS MORE MAN THAN YOULL EVER BE, said a student of Louisiana State University. 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