Leaves of Grass
Historically, LGBTQ+ people turned to literary expression as a means of overcoming repression experienced in their everyday lives through creative and imaginative communication. The social stigma associated with same-sex love and gender nonconforming behavior led to thick closet doors throughout much of the history of the United States. In some cases, letters, photos, and other physical evidence were destroyed.
Poet Emily Dickinson published almost no poems while she was alive yet became enormously popular when her first book appeared four years after her death. Today she and Walt Whitman are generally regarded as the two greatest American poets of the nineteenth century.
Emily Dickinson never married, but letters from her to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Dickinson are clearly romantic, passionate, and erotic (even though portions of the letters have been literally cut out, and there have been suggestions that editors of her writings changed some of her pronoun use from female to male). Dickinson's poems to or about Susan are somewhat erotic and could lead to a lesbian interpretation. Susan’s letters were destroyed upon Emily’s death — perhaps by her husband, Emily’s brother, Austin — and so the full story of their relationship can never be known.
Among Dickinson critics, there is little question that Emily Dickinson's love poetry is sexually and erotically charged. However, the exact nature of the sexuality and eroticism she incorporates into her poems seems to be less clear. Giving rise to much ambiguity, both homosexual and heterosexual elements pervade her work.
One lover of men, Walt Whitman (1819–1892) had a profound impact on the cultural landscape of this new country. Whitman, a journalist for some 15 years in Brooklyn and Manhattan, was a central figure among the Pfaff Bohemians from 1859 to 1862. He had begun writing poetry, which he first collected into Leaves of Grass in 1855. Considered by many at the time to be controversial and “offensive,” his sensual poetry was promoted by Clapp.
Around 1859, Whitman wrote 12 famously homoerotic “Calamus” poems, celebrating the manly love of comrades, that were included in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. This poetry made Whitman iconic in the US and Europe as one of the first people to openly express the concept of men loving men. He left for Washington, DC, in 1862 to attend to Civil War soldiers. Among the men that Whitman was reportedly intimate with were Peter Doyle, a bus conductor, and author Oscar Wilde.
Whitman celebrates a friendship in which physical contact and a kind of silent voluptuous emotion are essential elements. In order to settle the question as to the precise significance of "Calamus," J. A. Symohds wrote to Whitman, frankly posing the question. The answer (written from Camden on August 19th, 1890) is the only statement of Whitman's attitude towards homosexuality, and it is therefore desirable that it should be set on record:
"About the questions on 'Calamus ', etc., they quite daze me. Leaves of Grass' is only to be rightly construed by and within its own atmosphere and essential character — all its pages and pieces so coming strictly under. That the Calamus part has ever allowed the possibility of such construction as mentioned is terrible. I am fain to hope that the pages themselves are not to be even mentioned for such gratuitous and quite at the time undreamed and unwished possibility of morbid inferences — which are disavowed by me and seem damnable."
It seems from this that Whitman had never realised that there is any relationship whatever between the passionate emotion of physical contact from man to man, as he had experienced it and sung of it, and the act which with other people he would regard as a crime against nature. This may be singular, for there are many persons who had found satisfaction in friendships less physical and passionate than those described in Leaves of Grass, but Whitman was a man of concrete, emotional, instinctive temperament, lacking in analytical power, receptive to all influences, and careless of harmonising them.
He would most certainly have refused to admit that he was the subject of inverted sexuality. It remains true, however, that "manly love" occupied in his work a predominance which it would scarcely hold in the feelings of the "average man" whom Whitman wished to honour. A normally constituted person, having assumed the very frank attitude taken up by Whitman, would be impelled to devote far more space and far more ardor. Some friends and admirers of Whitman are not prepared to accept the evidence of this letter.
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