Walt Whitmanâs best poems demonstrate an almost unimaginable prescience; he and Dickinson, among 19th-century American poets, possess a nearly chilling self-consciousness, an acute self-analysis. Edward Carpenter, the British anarchist, writer, and champion of the Arts and Crafts movement whose life and romance were the model for E. M. Forsterâs novel Maurice, wrote this elegant description of a visit with Whitman in 1877; the emphases are Carpenterâs own:
âIf I had thought before (and I do not know that I had) that Whitman was eccentric, unbalanced, violent, my first interview certainly produced quite a contrary effect. No one could be more considerate, I may almost say courteous; no one could have more simplicity of manner and freedom from egotistic wrigglings; and I never met any one who gave me more the impression of knowing what he was doing more than he did.â
That there were words for homosexual behavior in Whitmanâs day there can be no doubt. Social structures for enabling same-sex congress seem to have been a feature of life in the modern city at least since the later 18th century, when the âMolly housesâ in London offered a zone of permission for transvestism. Herman Melville, in Redburn, carefully evokes the nattily dressed fellows who hang out in front of a downtown restaurant where opera singers perform; he means us to understand what these stylish outfits convey. Historian and theorist Luc Sante describes a 19th-century pamphlet that takes as its project the publication of the locations of various quite particular spots of diverse sexual practice in New York Cityâso that those informed of, say, the address of a bordello featuring willing boys can take special care to avoid this hazard. Trenchant evidence comes from Rufus Griswoldâs review of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:
âWe have found it impossible to convey any, even the most faint idea of style and contents, and of our disgust and detestation of them, without employing language that cannot be pleasing to ears polite; but it does seem that someone should, under circumstances like these, undertake a most disagreeable, yet stern duty. The records of crime show that many monsters have gone on in impunity, because the exposure of their vileness was attended with too great indelicacy. Peccatum illud horrible, inter Christianos non nominandum.â
Which is all a way of saying that Whitman inscribes his sexuality on the frontier of modernity; he is writing into beingâparticularly in the âCalamusâ poems of 1860, with their frank male-to-male loving, their assumption of equality on the part of the loversâa new situation. He does not know how to proceedâhe has no path âbut he does it anyway. My guess is that he couldnât have written âCalamus,â or the boldly homoerotic portions of the 1855 Leaves, even ten years later, as the advent of psychology increasingly led to a public perception of the normative, and imagery of the sacred family becomes the object of Victorian romance. As a category of identityâsodomite, invert, debauchee, pervert, Uranianâbegins to emerge, so the poems with their claims of a loving, healthy, freely embraced same-sex desire become unwriteable, paradoxically, just as new language of homosexual identity begins to appear. Unwriteable, and, it would seem from Whitmanâs later remarks, and some of his revisions, barely defensible.
Carpenter and his readers were reaching for signposts of a gay identity when such a thing barely existed, but Whitman is ultimately a queer poet in the deepest sense of the word: he destabilizes, he unsettles, he removes the doors from their jambs. There is an uncanniness in âSong of Myselfâ and the other great poems of the 1850s that, for all his vaunted certainty, Whitman wishes to underscore. Again and again, he points us toward what, it seems, must remain folded in the buds beneath speech, since it cannot be brought to the surface.
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