No section in Leaves of Grass has received so much close atteption and been the center of so much discussion and controversy as "Calamus." Friends of Whitman, particularly the "hot little prophet[s],''1 have indignantly defended the section against the charge of "indecency," usually by raising the opposite cry, "purity," and by citing Whitman's own saintlike, spiritual life as proof that the poems could not be unwholesome. William Sloane Kennedy calls "Calamus" "Whitman's beautiful democratic poems of friendship" and adds, "A genuine lover speaks in the Calamus pieces: a great and generous heart there pours forth its secret. Set side by side with these glowing confessions, other writings on friend ship seem frigid and calculating."2 At the opposite extreme is Mark Van Doren's recent judgment, which has been widely influential: "His [Whitman's] democratic dogmas of what validity are they when we consider that they base themselves upon the sentiment of 'manly love,' and that manly love is neither more nor less than an abnormal and deficient love?3 To the serious reader of "Calamus," the "manly love" that recurs both as a term and as an idea is of such genuine poetic complexity as to render it a good deal more than "abnormalf' and considerably less than "deficient."

It is indeed strange that the very element in Whitman's poetry that gained him nineteenth-century praise for his "purity"-should

1. Bliss Perry, Walt Whitman: His Life and Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908), p. 288.

2. Reminiscences of Walt Whitman ( London: Alexander Gardner, 1898), pp. 133 34.

3. Walt Whitman, Stranger," in his The Private Reader ( New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1942), p. 82.

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bring him twentieth-century condemnation for his "immorality." It i is worthwhile examining "Calamus" in detail in order to test the validity of the prevailing belief that in it Whitman gave stammering utterance to a doctrine whose implications he did not fully comprehend. I would first like to glance briefly at data external to the poems that might shed light on their meaning; next I would like to search through Whitman's revisions of the poems; then I shall turn attention to the major themes in "Calamus"; and finally I shall explore Whitman's poetic technique, particularly the recurring leaf-root metaphor, for any illumination it might afford in interpretation.

I. Extermil Evidence

Needless to say, the external evidence, evidence outside the "Calamus" poems themselves, has been sifted and resifted, and Whitman's life has been examined exhaustively in a series of studies, sympathetic and unsympathetic, for the clue, for the conclusive evidence, that will unveil the mystery of "Calamus." The search was begun in Whitman's lifetime by one of the most persistent students, John Addington Symonds. Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden contains many fascinating accounts of Symond's deep probing and Whitman's varied and puzzling reactions. At one time Symonds wrote: 'What the love, of man for man has been in the Past I think I know. What it is here now, I know also alas! What you say it can and shall be I dimly discern in your Poems. But this hardly satisfies me so desirous am I of learning what you teach."4 That Whitman understood Symonds is revealed in the poet's complaints to Traubel that Symonds was "always driving at me about that"; 'What does Calamus mean? What do the poems come to in the round-up? That is worrying him a good deal their involvement, as he suspects, is the passional relations of men with men the thing he reads so much of in the literature of southern Europe and sees something of in his own experience."5 But more revealing than the letter of denial to Symonds ("That the Calamus part has even allowed the possibility of such construction as mentioned is terrible") and the notorious claim of parenthood ("Though unmarried,

4. With Walt Whltman in Camden ( March 28-July 14, 1888) (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1906), I, 75.

5. Ibid., P. 73.

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I have had six children" )6 is the admission to Traubel of uncertainty of intent: "I often say to myself about Calamus perhaps it means more or less than I thought myself means different: perhaps I don't know what it all means perhaps never did know. My first instinct about all that Symonds writes is violently reactionary is strong and brutal for no, no, no. Then the thought intervenes that I maybe do not know all my own meanings: I say to myself: 'You, too, go away, come back, study your own book an alien or stranger, study your own book, see what it amounts to.'"7

The figure of Walt Whitman as alien to his own book is not so strange in an age of criticism that frequently asserts that the poet includes in his poems more than he knows, or in an age of Freud that is continually revealing that the artist exposes his inner being more than he intends. Did Whitman know his own meanings in "Calamus"? The question cannot, probably, be finally answered. But the problem as to what Whitman meant "Calamus" to mean can surely be solved. Abundant evidence as to the intended meaning of "Calamus" exists in Whitman's prose works, and, though not conclusive, as external data never is, such evidence is highly revealing and surely relevant. All the more valuable is this evidence in the case of "Calamus," in which intentional ambiguity ambiguity used consciously as a poetic device abounds, resulting in a language always something more or something less than appears on the surface. Wherever such ambiguity exists, a poet may always be quoted against himself.

It is surely significant that in his greatest prose piece, Democratic Vistas, Whitman does not silently pass over the "Calamus" emotion but rather dwells at length on it as central to the realization of hisideal democratic state. Of primary importance in understanding the distinctions Whitman would make in a precise definition of this emotionis the word he derived from phrenology, "adhesiveness."8 In a passage in Democratic Vistas Whitman cites adhesiveness as one of the two halves that together constitute the essence and tension of

6. Whitman's letter to Symonds in Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Slnger (New York: Macmillan Co., i955), p. 535.

7. Traubel, op. cit., pp. 76-77.

8. For a valuable account of Whitman's debt to phrenology for part of his key vocabulary, see Edward Hungerford, "Walt Whitman and His Chart of Bumps, ' Arrwrican L#eratute, II (January, 1931), 85~84.

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democracy: "It [democracy] is the old, yet ever-modern dream of earth, out of her eldest and her youngest, her fond philosophers and poets. Not that half only, individualism, which isolates. There is' another half, which is adhesiveness or love, that fuses, ties and aggregates, making the race comrades, and fraternizing all. Both are to be vitalized by religion . . ." (V, 80).9

In another passage in Democratic Vistas Whitman returns to this fundamental concept of his democratic ideal: "Intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man which, hard to define, underlies the lessons and ideals of the profound saviours of every land and age, and which seems to promise, when thoroughly develop'd, cultivated and recognized in manners and literature, the most substantial hope and safety of the future of these States, will then be fully express'd" (V, 80). As, above, he opposes adhesiveness to individuality, so, in a footnote to this passage, he carefully distinguishes adhesiveness from "amativeness" (another phrenological term): "It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto pos- sessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it, ) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof" (V, 80). The remainder of the footnote characterizes this "manly friendship" v as "fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long," and again stresses the necessity of such "Calamus" emotion for democracy, "without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself."

The purity, innocence, and spirituality of the "Calamus" concept as expressed in Democratic Vistas cannot be missed. The idea is not original with Whitman. As he states, the "Calamus" idea was expressed by all mankind's saviors and has frequently been expressed by the term "brotherly love." In short, it is a basic Christian concept Whitman has found indispensable to the democratic ideal. The "Calamus" emotion has two facets personal and social: on v' the one hand, adhesiveness merges particular individuals in a deeply

9. Quotations from Whitman are where possible identified in the text by volume and page number of The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman, ed. Richard M. Bucke et al. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1902).

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personal, yet purely spiritual, attachment; on the other hand, a multitude of such attachments interpenetrating and binding a natiOn creates a democratic state rooted deeply in genuinely moral human character rather than in convention or law.

Although Whitman did not live to see his ideal state, he did ex. perience the kind of personal attachment he celebrated. If further proof of the purity of Whitman's intended meaning is needed, it may be found in the series of letters he wrote to his Civil War companion, Peter Doyle, the unsophisticated Washington horsecar conductor. The letters have been published under the appropriate title Calamus, as they constitute a record of precisely the kind of relationship Whitman meant to describe by that title. The terms of endearment Whitman uses in these letters are lavish and suggest metaphorically the character of the emotion motivating his attachment: "Dear Pete, dear son, my darling boy, my young and loving brother . . ." ( VIII, 42 ). It would be difficult to challenge the purity and spirituality of the feelings Whitman and Doyle had for each other, at least as they emerge in these letters, but, on the other hand, there can be no doubt that these feelings transcend those usual to friends or companions of the same sex.

The casual tone and genuine naivete which Whitman uses in this correspondence to describe the depth of his friendship for "some of the pilots" in New York suggest that in his hands the symbols and language of love have become transfigured: "I have been out all the forenoon knocking around the water is my favorite recreation I could spend two or three hours every day of my life here, and never get tired some, when we meet we kiss each other (I am an exception to all their customs with others) some of their boys have grown up since I have known them, and they too know me and are very friendly" (VIII, 46). Such kissing, celebrated in "Calamus" as the signal of the genuine affection of comrades, is a physical token of a spiritual relationship. It is described also by another of Whitman's real-life comrades, John Burroughs, in his journal of January, 1864: "And so kind, sympathetic, charitable, humane, tolerant a man I did not suppose was possible. He loves everything and everybody. I saw a soldier the other day stop on the street and kiss him. He kisses me as if I were a girl."l0 Surely the innocence

10. Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs, Comrades (New York: Hougbt n MifRin Co., 1931), p. 17. For another example of Whitman's "Calamus" feelings in his real as contrasted with his poetic life, see Allen, op. cit., pp. 297-99, an account of the relationship of the poet and Thomas P. Sawyer reconstructed from letters written in 1863.

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of such behavior on the conscious level cannot be questioned. One can but conclude, from the available evidence, that the love celebrated in "Calamus had a genuinely personal and pure meaning for Whitman and that he advocated it for a serious social end democracy.

II. Revisions

But all this external evidence does not dispose of "Calamus": the poems themselves must have the final say. A brief examination of the revisions Whitman made in the "Calamus" poems should indicate, at least in part, his intended meaning.

In a recent publication of Whitmans Manuscripts, Fredson Bowers has demonstrated that at an early stage of their growth the "Calamus" poems were twelve in number and had as their title and unifying symbol, "Live Oak with Moss." The twelve poems are listed below in the order in which Whitman orginally arranged them but with the titles of the final edition (note that 5 and 8 were rejected in 1867):

1. Not Heat Flames Up and Consumes

2. I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

3. When I Heard at the Close of Day

4. This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful

5. (Rejected 1867 appeared in 1860 as No. 8, "Long I Thought That Knowledge")

8. What Think You I Take My Pen in Hand

7. Recorders Ages Hence

8. ( Rejected 1867 appeared in 1860 as No. 9, "Hours Continuing

9. I Dream'd in a Dream 10. O You Whom I Often and Silently Come I1. Earth, My Likeness 12. To a Western Boy1l

For at least two of these poems (2 and 3) there are earlier holograph copies, with some vaAations, suggesting that the twelve-poem Sequence might well have been orgamzed (in the usual Whitman manner) from diverse poems related only thematically. Mr. Bowers' C njecture that "for some time Whitman may not have intended to

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print these poems"12 implying that they are some kind of ember rassing personal revelation, does not seem consistent with Whit man's intention, clearly revealed in a manuscript note, to write a companion series: "A string of Poems, (short etc.) embodying the amative love of woman the same as Live Oak Leaves do the passion of friendship for man" ( X, 18 ).

Mr. Bowers finds in this twelve-poem series "an artistically complete story of attachment, crisis, and renunciation"l3 and speculates that this sequence "was motivated by some specific emotiona1 ex- perience."l4 With the aid of a suggestion from G. W. Allen concerning poem 3, Mr. Bowers even offers a conjecture of the date. Connecting a line in the poem ("When I heard at the close of the day how I had been praised in the Capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that followed") with a favorable review of Leaves of Grass that appeared in a Washington paper in February, 1856, Mr. Bowers offers the tentative guess that the "event recorded in this poemmay precede even the second edition of Leaves."15 Observing that the poem describes the poet as rising early in the morning and bathing in the ocean, Mr. Bowers casts some doubt on the Februarydating He overlooks the fact that the connection the poet draws between the praise in the "Capitol" and the morning swim in the ocean is not a connection of time at all but of emotional intensity; the feeling of happiness on the one occasion is more intense than on the other: months or years might very well have separated the two events. And moreover, if one is allowed such speculation, why not guess, on the basis of poem 2, "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing," that the "emotional experience" of the sequence is somehow linked to the 1848 trip to New Orleans?

Perhaps the basic error in all this kind of speculation is the assumption that there must be an "event recorded" in a particular Whitman poem. Poems seldom "record" but frequently "transmute"events. The twelve-poem sequence seems to derive not from a single experience but from a multitude of fragments transfigured and

12. Ibid., p. ~ii.

13. Ibid., p. L~vi.

14. Ibid., p. L~x.

15. Ib~., p. ~i.

16. Ibid., p. 1Dr.

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ordered thematically by a unifying sensibility. Although there are present all the emotions involved in "attachment, crisis, and renunciation," there is no clear narrative plot, as these words imply. And, indeed, the fact that all twelve of these poems were scattered throughout the "Calamus" section in 1860 suggests that the earlier sequence was somewhat tenuous. The "Live Oak with Moss" poems, although they contribute richly to our understanding of the evolution of "Calamus," do not provide the missing "clew": they are perhaps the infant but not the embryo. And to assume that the embryo is some specific emotional experience that may be accurately dated is to perpetuate in a new form the old biographical myth that Whitman discovered his transcendent poetic inspiration in an abortive Creole love affair in New Orleans.

Contrary to frequent implications by Whitman's critics, his revisions of "Calamus" over a period of some thirty years do not reveal that he was trying to "cover up" or change the original character of the group of poems. Perhaps the most significant and revealing revision made was in the poem now titled "Sometimes with One I Love," which ended originally: "Doubtless I could not have perceived the universe, or written one of my poems, if I had not freely given myself to comrades, to love.''l7 Through revision this line became: "(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd, / Yet out of that I have written these songs").18 Two highly significant conclusions may be drawn from this revision: first, changes in "Calamus" were not intended to make the poems less personal indeed, in this instance, the poem has been made to appear more personal; and, second, and more important, biographical interpretation, the acceptance of Whitman's poetry at "face value," is highly dangerous and likely to be misleading. It would seem safe to assume that revision of "Sometimes with One I Love" from a statement of generalized experience to a suggestion of a highly personal and specific experience was made not for biographical but for poetic or dramatic reasons. How often has the first version of Whitman'spoetry contained such seemingly specific references for similar

17. Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860), p. 376

18. Quotations from the final or "deathbed" edition of Leaves of Grass may be easily located by title in any edition of the book. All such quotations have been checked with the text in the 1902 Complete Writings.

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reasons? If, in "Sometimes with One I Love, the certain person'' loved ardently is a figment of Whitman's poetic imagination, it would seem the duty of the impartial critic to distinguish carefully, in the study of Whitman, his poetic from his real world and to ret frain from passing so easily and superficially from one to the otheron the naive assumption that there is no difference.

The forty-five poems of the 1860 version of "Calamus' had, by the time of the appearance of Whitman's last edition, been reduced to thirty-nine. Three poems were rejected, four were transferred to other sections of Leaves of Grass, and one new poem was added. At first glance might seem that the three poems were deleted because of their personal nature, because they revealed more than the author intended. But equally "personal" poems were allowed to stay. Close examination of the discarded poems reveals that there were other valid reasons for rejection. In "Long I Thought That Knowledge," the poet says that for a time he found the essence or meaning of life in a series of interests obtaining knowledge, becoming the orator of America, emulating "old and new heroes," and, finally, composing the "songs of the New World" but he discovered that he could be the "singer of songs no longer": "One who loves me is jealous of me, and withdraws me from all but love." This emotional dilemma becomes the central idea of the poem, which concludes: "I am indifferent to my own songs I will go with him I love, / It is to be enough for us that we are together We never separate again."19 There aretwo good reasons for the deletion of this poem: it introduces the emotion of jealousy into "Calamus" love an emotion which wasavoided in the other poems and which Whitman probably decided was foreign to his concept of comradely attachment; and the poem contradicts certain basic ideas that recur throughout the "Calamus"section. It would be difficult to reconcile the poet's attitude of indifference toward his songs as expressed in this rejected poem with the determination, announced in the opening poem of 'Calamus' to sing the songs of "manly attachment," to "celebrate the need of comrades." And it would be equally difficult to reconcile this indifference with the frequently expressed sentiment in "Calamus" that it was the love of comrades that initiated the poetic impulse and granted the poetic power.

19. Leaves of Grass ( 1860 ), p. 355.

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Immediately following "Long I Thought That Knowledge" in the 1860 edition appeared another rejected poem,"Hours Continuing~ Long, Sore and Heavy-Hearted." The dominant emotion expressed is despair (rather than jealousy) over the defection of a "lover": "Hours discouraged, distracted for the one I cannot content myself without, soon I saw him content himself without me." This poem takes on the character of a bashful, stammering confession: "Sullen and suffering hours! (I am ashamed but it is useless I am what I am; / Hours of my torment I wonder if other men ever have the like, out of the like feelings?"20 The most facile interpretation of these lines is that they are a confession of abnormality and that the poem was rejected because Whitman wanted to suppress such an ill-advised revelation. Such an interpretation ignores the passages, equally confession-like, that remained in "Calamus": all the poems addressed directly to the reader, such as "Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand," suggest that the poet is "far different" from "what you supposed." Again, a more probable reason for the rejection of "Hours Continuing Long" is that the emotional tone of desair and dejection is generally foreign to the "Calamus" section; and particularly is such an attitude, growing out of a dissolved friendship, in conflict with the oft expressed sentiment that such experience made possible the poetic expression. Similar reasons may be found for deletion of "Who Is Now Reading This?" the third and last of the rejected poems. It would be contradictory for the poet, apparently on such sure footing elsewhere in "Calamus," to admit along with the reader that he is "puzzled" at himself. One may readily conclude, I think, that Whitman rejected these three poems not for personal but for poetic reasons, not to suppress anything they revealed but to achieve internal consistency in the "Calamus" cluster of poems.

Of the four poems transferred from "Calamus" to other sections of Leaves of Grass, three were transferred entire to "Whispers of Heavenly Death," and the other was divided into two parts, one of which was placed in "Whispers of Heavenly Death" and one in "Incription." Inasmuch as the second poem of "Calamus," "Scented Herbage of My Breast," introduces the theme of the inseparability of love and death, the transfer of a number of these poems from

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"Calamus" to a section whose title proclaims the subject as death is significant. As no poem in "Calamus" other than "Scented Herbage" develops the love-death theme, it might be assumed that Whitman, by shifting these poems, desired to modify this theme; or perhaps he considered treatment of it in "Scented Herbage" as adequate and requiring no further elaboration. Examination of these poems does not clearly reveal the poet's motives; in all of them there is an ambiguous or metaphorical treatment of death. In Of Him I Love Day and Might" and "O Living Always, Always Dying," the words "death," "dying," "corpse," "burial-place," and others take on double vt meanings: "burial-places" become not merely the depository of the dead but the depository of all that is material, including the living; "corpses" become not merely the lifeless body but past personalitiesor attitudes of the individual now outgrown, changed or dead. "That Music Always Round Me" takes on a significance that it could not have had in "Calamus," derived primarily from the title of its new section, "Whispers of Heavenly Death," but also from the poem that dominates the section, "Chanting the Square Deific." Poem 31 in the 1860 version of "Calamus," the first half of which became "What Ship Puzzled at Sea" in "Whispers of Heavenly Death," thesecond half, "What Place Is Besieged" in "Inscriptions," seems from the beginning to have been a "program" poem, celebrating the purpose and effect of Leaves of Grass as a whole rather than one of the themes peculiar to "Calamus."

One other extensive revision in "Calamus" should be noted. Poem 5 in the 1860 edition was a long poem emphasizing the social or democratic results of the "Calamus" emotion:

States!
Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers? 
By an agreement on a paper? Or by arms?21

Over half the poem was cut, the remaining portion being the poem now titled "For You, O Democracy," one of the best-known and most frequently quoted poems in Leaves of Grass. No one can doubt that Whitman's revision was an artistic improvement, pointing up much more dramatically and effectively his social theme than did the longer poem. The portion he trimmed from the poem was not

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discarded but utilized in "Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice," ``Drum-Taps,'' a transfer that suggests the importance of the "Calamus'' concept to the war poems. The war proved to be for Whitman a crucial national experience in which the social theories of "Calamus," untried on any large scale, could be tested and, as it turned out and as he recorded in "Drum-Taps," confirmed under fire.

Although the revisions here discussed are by no means all that Whitman made in "Calamus," they are the most extensive and significant, and they certainly do not reveal a pattern of suppression or concealment. In almost every instance, sufficient artistic reasons can be found to justify the change undertaken. By and large, the "Calamus" section remained in essence the same through some thirty years of revision. There exists no evidence that Whitman ever genuinely regretted the form "Calamus" had originally taken. Indeed, in 1874, in a review he prepared for John Burroughs' signature, Whitman singled out the "Calamus" emotion as a primary virtue of his Leaves: "Yet it [Walt Whitman's verse] is singularly emotional; probably no one has so daringly and freely carried 'manly attachment' into expression as this author."22

III. Major Themes

The germ of the principal theme in "Calamus" is found in a paper discovered among Whitman's manuscripts with notations indicating that the poet had at one time planned to develop a lecture on the topic: "Why should there be these modesties and prohibitions that keep women from strong actual life from going about there with men? I desire to say to you, and let you ponder well upon it, the fact that under present arrangement, the love and comradeship of a woman, of his wife however welcome, however complete does not and cannot satisfy the grandest requirements of a manly soul for love and comradeship, The man he loves, he often loves with more passionate attachment than he ever bestows on any woman, even his wife. Is it that the grou~h of love needs the free air seasons, perhaps more wildness more rudeness? Why is thc love of women so invalid, so transient"23 Some of the ideas expressed in

22 Barrus, op. cit., p. 108.

Clifton Joseph Furness (ed), Walt Whitman's Workshop Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), pp. 63-64.

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this crude early note become embodied in "Calamus" in Whitman's poetic expression of the distinction between the two kinds of love--amativeness and adhesiveness:

Fast-anchor'd eternal O love! O woman I love! 
O bride! O wife! more resistless than I can tell, the 
    thought of you! 
Then separate, as disembodied or another born, 
Ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation, 
I ascend, I float in the regions of your love O man, 
O sharer of my roving life.

Critics have frequently noted that "Children of Adam" celebrates love of man for woman, while "Calamus" celebrates love of manfor man; in the former, emphasis is on the physical or sexual aspectsof love, in the latter on the spiritual. The above poem would bear out this distinction: love of man for man is "disembodied," "ethereal,"the last athletic reality." For Whitman, "athletic" had connotations of a desirable robustness or health: the "last athletic reality" would,surely, be a robustness of the soul or spirit that enables it to encompass more than self. Man is the "sharer" of the poet's "roving life," the companion on hisspiritual journey.

In "Calamus" variations on the central theme are developed, dropped, reintroduced and treated from a fresh point of view, dropped again, echoed later, and so on, through the thirty-nine poems. This ebb and flow, or symphonic treatment of theme, suggests, as is natural in poetry, not a logical but an emotional development- of ideas. In order to see the several aspects of the "Calamus" emotion, in order to understand its varied facets, it should proveuseful to isolate and examine the major variations of the basic theme that thread their way through the section.

First, as in almost all sections of Leaves of Grass, is the announcement of the poetic program by the chanting poet:+

I proceed for all who are or have been young men, 
To tell the secret of my nights and days, 
To celebrate the need of comrades.

As "In Paths Untrodden" introduces this resolve, "Scented Herbage of My Breast" extends it and, later, it is reintroduced in "These I Singing in Spring" and elsewhere. In these poems the poet seems to consider himself in some way eminently fit, perhaps through experience, for the task he has assumed: "For who but I should under

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stand lovers and all their sorrow and joy? / And who but I should be the poet of comrades?" And the resolution to celebrate "manly attachment, calls forth a renunciation of other interests, a dedication almost religious in its intensity in Scented Herbage of My Breast":

I Will sound myself and comrades only, I will never again utter a callonly their call,
I will raise with it immortal reverberations through the States.

The hyperbole in the first line (Whitman did "utter" other "calls") is a poetic device used throughout "Calamus" for intensifying the felt or evoked emotion; such exaggeration must be taken into account in any honest interpretation of the poems.

Closely allied with these poems announcing the poetic intent are the poems, usually addressed directly to the reader, that are cast in the form of a warning:

I give you fair warning before you attempt me further, 
I am not what you supposed, but far different.

The poet insists upon his "difference" in a number of poems, beginning with "Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand" and including "Recorders Ages Hence," "Are You the New Person Drawn toward Me?" and "To a Western Boy." In "Recorders Ages Hence" the poet confides that he will take his future reader "underneath this impassive exterior" and reveal his genuine personality "the tenderest lover." In "Are You the New Person Drawn toward Me?" the poet again admonishes, "To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose." And in "To a Western Boy," he advises the lad that he cannot become an "eleve" of the poets unless "blood like mine circle . . . in your veins."

The poet differs from others only in his capacity for "Calamus" love; his exterior, what he appears to be, gives no indication whatsoever of the depths possible to him in spiritual attachment to others. ~ large number of poems are devoted to portrayal of the impact and achievement of such attachments. In "Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances," the poet asserts that, in the doubt and uncertainty about reality and "identity beyond the grave," such love grants unt ld and untellable wisdom," a knowledge similar to the intuitive hlo\vledge of the mystic: "He ahold of my hand has completely Satisfied me." "When I Heard at the Close of the Day" dramatically portrays the importance of such love to the individual: the "plaudits

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in the Capitol" or the accomplishment of plans was as nothing to the knowledge that "my dear friend my lover was on his way coming." In this brief drama, the poet utilizes the language and conventions of romantic love in such details as "all that day my food nourish'd me more," and particularly in the vivid closing picture:

In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me And his arm lay lightly around my breast and
that night I was happy

Similar portraits, in which the physical comradeship becomes a token of deep spiritual attachment, are vividly drawn in "A Glimpse" and "We Two Boys Together Clinging."

In "Not Heat Flames Up and Consumes" the poet describes the "Calamus" love as even more intense and consuming than flames (called the "subtle electric fire" in "O You Whom I Often and Silently Come"), and as inevitable and mystical as sea waves. Indeed, the "Calamus" experience seems at some point to merge with the mystical: the "last athletic reality" becomes the reality of the spiritual as opposed to the material universe. The poet's soul is "borne through the open air, / Wafted in all directions O love, for friendship, for you." This image of the floating self, which appears also in "Fast-Anchor'd Eternal O Love!" ("I float in the regions of /your love O man"), aptly suggests the spiritual merge of the mystic with the Transcendent. It is surely significant (and illuminating) that in "Song of Myself" God is conceived as the "great Camerado, \ I the lover true for whom I pine." At the center of the "Calamus" emotion is a profound religious feeling, a feeling of spiritual identity and oneness with other beings.

Perhaps the most curious of these intensely personal poems cast in the language of romantic love is "Earth, My Likeness." In this poem one can imagine the poet contemplating a globe representing the earth:

Though you look so impassive, ample and spheric there, 
I now suspect that is not all; 
I now suspect there is something fierce in you eligible to burst forth.

The association of the earth with a relatively fragile balloon is inevitable upon the introduction of the term"burst forth." But more important than this secondary image is the implication of the object of the poet's contemplation the earth, the world as we know it

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through our physical senses. Although the material globe seems ''impassive, ample," in reality there is "something fierce" underneath ready to "burst forth." What could this "something" be but the spiritual reality behind the material illusion, "fierce" because it has been ignored or suppressed for so long? This interpretation seems manda- tory if the remainder of the poem is to be coherent:

For an athlete is enamour'd of me, and I of him,
But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible to
   burst forth,
I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs.

The spiritual reality, in this case a deep and agitated spiritual love, is "fierce and terrible" only in the sense that any spiritual passion could be when pent up for long without object on which to bestow its emotional intensity. If the language seems too intense for the spiritual meaning, one need but note Whitman's use of almost identical language in a prose context which leaves no doubt as to meaning: "To this terrible, irrepressible yearning, (surely more or less down underneath in most human souls) this never-satisfied appetite for sympathy, and this boundless offering of sympathy this universal democratic comradeship this old, eternal, yet ever-new interchange of adhesiveness, so fitly emblematic of America I have given in that t' book [Leaves of Grass], undisguisedly, declaredly, the openest expression" (V, 199). As the mystic cannot describe the source of his v certainty, as it would be audacious for him to attempt to define the nature of the Transcendent with which he has merged, so the poet "dare" not attempt to convey the meaning of the feeling that possesses him. There is terror in an alien spirituality, a spirituality so long foreign to man's experience.

As it is dishonest to extract lines without regard to context, so it is misleading to discuss any single poem in "Calamus" without i regard for the poems that surround it and modify or qualify its meaning. The poems in which the "Calamus" emotion appears to be a highly personal and intensely passionate spiritual attachment are informed and qualified by the many interspersed poems that celebrate the "Calamus" emotion as a social and democratic force. Indeed, poems of this latter kind make up the bulk of "Calamus." The poet thus finds in the "Calamus" concept the basic impulse necessary to the two conflicting elements in his ideal state, individuality and

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equality, or "one's-self" and "en-masse." The "Calamus" emotion provides, however, not only the impulses but also their means of reconciliation: the same spiritual love that attaches one closely to an individual will also merge him with the mass. Whitman asserted in prose: ". . . important as they are in my purpose as emotional expressions for humanity, the special meaning of the 'Calamus' cluster of 'Leaves of Grass, (and more or less running through the book, and cropping out in 'Drum-Taps, ) mainly resides in its political significance. In my opinion, it is by a fervent, accepted development of comradeship, the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north and south, east and west it is by this, I say, and by what goes directly and indirectly along with it, that the United States of the future, ( I cannot too often repeat,) are to be most effectually welded together, intercalated, anneal'd into a living union" (V, 199).

In "I Hear It Was Charged against Me" the poet seems to acknowledge the possibility of misinterpretation of his message:

I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
But really I am neither for nor against institutions.

The dear love of man for his comrades, 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.

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
       With the love of comrades,
               With the life-long love of comrades.

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The "Calamus" message has, the poet insists throughout, particular application to America. The prairie grass itself, in "inland America," offers the symbolic example; the "spiritual corresponding" is to be the "copious and close companionship of men" those with sweet and lusty flesh clear of taint," "simple, never-constrain'd, never obedient." In "A Promise to California," the poet, noting that "these States tend inland and toward the Western sea," assures the West, "soon I travel toward you, to remain, to teach robust American love." The poet asserts in "To the East and to the West," "I believe the main purport of these States is to found a superb friendship, exalte', previously unknown." Although this kind of friendship has never been realized before, the "germs" for it "are in all men"; "it waits, and has always been waiting, latent in all men." But though America seems to have a special role to play in the evolution of this new relationship among men, the"Calamus" emotion knows no geographical boundaries; comradely attachment or brotherly love will bind and democratize not only the nation but also the world. In "This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful," the poet, in reverie about the men of Germany, Italy, China, Russia, and other lands, states: "It seems to me if I could know those men I should become attached to them as I do to men in my own lands." As Whitman has said elsewhere, in prose, "Perhaps the most illustrious culmination of the Modern and of Republicanism may prove to be a signal cluster of joyous, more exalted Bards of Adhesiveness, identically one in soul, but contributed by every nation, each after its disffnctive kind."24

In direct emotional contrast to this broad social theme is a theme that delicately, almost shyly, threads its way through the section and that, in the way it is presented, seems almost a confession. The theme is introduced in the sixth poem of the section, "Not Heaving from My Ribb'd Breast Only," which, after a catalogue of the physical manifestations normally associated with romantic love (such as "husky partings through clinch'd teeth" and "murmurs of my dreams while I sleep"), concludes:

Not in any or all of them O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life! 
Need I that you exist and show yourself any more than in these songs.

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In other words, the songs become the only necessary outlet for the pote's adhesiveness. The idea that the writing of the poetry offers emotional release is contained also in that strange poem, "Trickle Drops": "From my breast, from within where I was conceal'd, press forth red drops, confession drops." Particularly curious is the poet's calling upon the drops, "ashamed" and "blushing,' to "glow upon all I have written."

We have already seen, in Sometimes with One I Love," that Whitman relates the inspiration or motive for "these songs" to his love that "was not return'd." The poetry becomes the "pay" that is "certain one way or another" in the experience of love, the "pay" which confirms that, in reality, there "is no unreturn'd love." But the best known of these "confession" poems is "Here the Frailest Leaves of Me," which originally stood as the next to last poem in the section and whose first line ("Here my last words, and the most baffling")25 was subsequently deleted. This short poem now appears near the middle of "Calamus":

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, 
Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, 
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

All these poems suggest that the poet has found sufficient fulfilment in art for certain emotional needs in his personality frustrated in real life. There seems to be frank recognition by the poet that his poetry represents the sublimation of his adhesiveness. It is these poems that those who have sought so diligently for abnormality have seized upon as open admission by the poet. Why does he "shade and hide" his thoughts? The answer to this question must lie in an examination of "Calamus" not as rhetoric or philosophy but as poetry. The poet reveals here not his guilt but his poetic method ambiguity.

IV. Poetic Technique

We have noted in a number of-poems Whitman's use of the dic tion and tokens of romantic love to describe the "Calamus" comradeship. Such transference from the physical to the spiritual results, whether intentionally or not, in an ambiguity of meaning that gives rise to endless controversy. There is no doubt, however, that a good deal of the ambiguity in "Calamus" is intentional and is consciously

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used to achieve certain poetic effects. Central to the sections ambiguity is the symbol introduced in the title "Calamus"-- and developed extensively in several key poems. Whitman himself, in one of his rare comments touching on specific meanings in his work, explains the symbol: "Calamus is the very large and aromatic grass, or rush, growing about water ponds in the valleys spears about three feet high; often called Sweet Flag; grows all over the Northern and Middle States. The recherche or ethereal sense oś the term, as used in my book, arises probably from the actual Calamus present- ing the biggest and hardiest kind of spears of grass, and their fresh, aquatic, pungent bouquet."28

There is a fundamental value, of course, in the use of calamus as an extension of the metaphor, 'leaves of grass," which in its common meaning has been elaborated more or less fully in "Song of Myself." Calamus is a very special kind of "grass" with unique connotations, just as "manly attachment" or "athletic love" is an emotion limited rather than universal, with distinct differences in its intense spirituality from other kinds of love. The calamus plant, in addition to having "the biggest and hardiest kind of spears of grass" and a "pungent bouquet," is found growing in clusters of severa~ fascicles each, usually in out-of-the-way, secluded spots in and around ponds. As they are developed in "Calamus" each of these attributes of the plant suggests some aspect of the love of comrades: the size and toughness of the spears symbolize the depth and hardiness of such love; the distinctive odor suggests the spirituality of the attachments; growth in clusters suggests the twofold results of the realization of such emotion: personal attachment and democracy the seclusion of the plant indicates the rarity of such revolutionary friendships.

Development of the calamus as a symbol is a part of the drama of the section. In the elaboration of the calamus image the poet achieves some of his most successful effects. Not only are all the attributes of the calamus plant utilized as symbolic, but the parts o the plant, the leaf and the root, are fully exploited in all their possible meanings. It is in such exploitation, where meaning on one level frequently expands to include meaning on another level, that

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ambiguity becomes a conscious poetic device. Although the resulting complexity makes for an enriched poetry, it is the kind of poetry easily open to distortion in interpretation. Such has been the fate of "Calamus."

In the opening poem of the section, "In Paths Untrodden," the untrodden paths by the pond waters quickly become more than the out-of-the-way places where the calamus grows: they become untried or infrequent patterns of human behavior, the action of the dissenter, the thought of the skeptic, the belief of the individualist '(Throughout "Calamus" the recurring image of the secluded, quiet pond is in significant contrast in its emotional connotations to the "pent-up aching river" that served as a basic image throughout "Children of Adam": the pond suggests a serene soul, the river a soul perturbed.)The long, sturdy blades of the fragrant calamus ,plant become "tongues aromatic" to which the poet responds "in this secluded spot." Here he has found something greater than the materialistic "pleasures" and "profits" and "conformities" he had been trying to feed his soul. He has found spiritual love ("manly attachment" or "athletic love" ): the calamus blades ( as tongues ) "inform" by serving, in their fascicle clusters where "many" are brought together as one, as examples of close personal attachment as well as of broadly diffused love, and as examples of seclusion from the "clank of the world." That the "tongues" convey a spiritual message is indi~cated by their aroma: always in Leaves of Grass, odor or fragrance, a reality that has no apparent materialistic existence, symbolizes the spiritual, the ultimate reality that is impalpable and unknowable by any of the ordinary methods of knowing.

While the calamus blades are conceived as tongues in "In Paths Untrodden," they take on greater complexity in "Scented Herbage of My Breast." The title evokes a concrete, physical image of the robust, hirsute chest, an image that suggests the solidity and strength of the spiritual love symbolized. The herbage is scented; it is the spiritual emanation of the seat of love the breast or heart. But the herbage is soon involved in further meanings:

Leaves from you I glean, I write, to be perused best afterwards,
Tomb-leaves, body-leaves growing up above me above death.

The herbage thus becomes first the grain (fruit of his being, thought) collected (gleaned) by the poet, and next the leaves" of a book,

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where the message from his heart can be preserved and "perused best afterwards', after the strong emotional grip has passed. None of these meanings is abandoned even as new ones are sought out. "Tomb-leaves" are leaves that symbolize the immortality of man man embodied in a book of leaves or, more literally, the "leaves of grass" that grow above one s grave (note section 6 of "Song of Myself"); "body-leaves" fuse the image of hair with the image of the grass growing above graves, out of the dead buried beneath.

But real death is denied: "Perennial roots, tall leaves, O the winter shall not freeze you delicate leaves." These physical details, applicable to the calamus plant, suggest the attributes of spiritual love. The root is the heart, the leaf the manifestation the human as well as the poetic gesture (the poet exclaims later, "O blossoms of my blood! I permit you to tell in your own way of the heart that is under you" ); the winter is the hostility of society toward the spiritual. Genuine spiritual love cannot be killed by such hostility. In its seclusion, in the life it finds withdrawn from society, such love florishes: "O I do not know whether many passing by will discover you or inhale your faint odor, but I believe a few will." But spiritual love is not the source of mere pleasure: "O I do not know what you mean there underneath yourselves, you are not happiness." This elu- sive meaning takes on a mystical cast as the poet indicates the close relationship of love and death:

Yet you are beautiful to me you faint tinged roots, you make me think of
death,

Death is beautiful from you, (what indeed is finally beautiful except death
and love?)

O I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers, I think
it must be for death.

The faint tinged roots" of the calamus plant, symbolizing on one
level the heart, the organ from which love takes its origin, on another
level suggests the phallus, in turn a token of "manly attachment." Death
is beautiful" from such roots: that is, death from a surfeit  f spiritua1
love, from a yearning for the final merge with the great Camerado (as in
"Song of Myself') is a beautiful experience. As death releases the confined
soul for final and lasting union with Other souls, death really becomes the
genuine consummation of Spiritual love: "I am not sure but the high soul
of lovers welcomes death most."

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At no time in this first part of "Scented Herbage of My Breast"
is the central symbol dropped or are any of its meanings forgotten:
Indeed O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the same as  you
mean, 
Grow up taller sweet leaves that I may seel grow up out of my breastl
Spring away from the conceal'd heart there!
 Do not fold yourself so in your pink-tinged roots timid leaves!
 Do not remain down there so ashamed, herbage of my breast!

Throughout these lines, all the complex meaning of the symbol is
operative. Never is the vividness of the actual calamus plant sacrificed or
any of its natural attributes distorted for symbolic purposes.  The leaves in
this passage are, simultaneously, the leaves of the calamus plant, the hair
on the chest (a suggestion utilized later when the poet asserts, "Come I am
determined to unbare this broad breast of mine"), the grass growing atop
the grave, pages of a book (Leaves of Grass itself), the outward
manifestation of the hidden heart, and the capacity for spiritual love and
the yearning for its return. The root is, of course, the calamus root with its
distinctive color and odor; but at the same time it suggests the flesh where
the hair is imbedded, the phallus in all its mystic associations (these
meanings suggesting the vitality and virility of the "robust" spiritual love
the poet describes), the buried corpse that feeds the grass above its grave,
and the unseen heart as the source of the blood (passion) that has nourished
the spiritual love.

The poet himself appears to admit that his symbol has become so
burdened with meaning that it ceases to function effectively:
Emblematic and capricious blades I leave you, now you serve me not, 
I will say what I have to say by itself.

After all the serious punning on "leaves," one might well read "I leave
you" as a sly bit of humor into which the poet has been tempted as a farewell
to the calamus, which has proved not only "emblematic" but "capricious."
Perhaps the calamus is a capricious symbol because, although it was intended
primarily to suggest the spiritual, it inevitably by the very nature of its form
gave rise to physical associations: although these associations might in turn
prove useful in suggesting attributes of the spiritual, they are also rather easily
open to misinterpretation. After dropping the symbol,

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what the poet says "by itself" is a reiteration of what has been said through the
symbol. He addresses death:
That you hide in these shifting forms of life, for reasons, and that they 
  are mainly for you,
That you beyond them come forth to remain, the real reality,
That behind the mask of materials you patiently wait, no matter how long....

Here the poet glimpses the truth asserted by all mystics, that the physical
world that we know through our senses is a "mask of materials," a "show of
appearance," that the world beyond to which death brings us is the "real
reality." Death, then, represents the only means to the consummation of
genuine and deeply felt spiritual love. It is surely needless to point out that
such love is not confined to males; it may exist wherever the physical is not
the primary motive in close personal, passionate attachment.

The calamus image is reintroduced in "These I Singing in Spring"
(note the ambiguity of the antecedent of "these"). The setting of this poem
("Now along the pond-side, now wading in a little, fearing not the wet") is
essentially that of the opening poem, "In Paths Untrodden." In contrast with
this secluded spot into which the poet has wandered is the place from which
he has withdrawn: "Collecting I traverse the garden the world, but soon I pass
the gates." One need but recall the opening poem of "Children of Adam"
("To the garden the world anew ascending") to realize that the garden through
whose gates the poet has passed is Eden, the garden of innocent sexual love
celebrated in "Children of Adam"; he has found Adamic love insufficient and
searches for a love beyond it by the secluded pond side. Soon he is
surrounded:
Alone I had thought, yet soon a troop gathers around me
Some walk by my side and some behind, and some embrace my arms or
    neck
They the spirits of dear friends dead or alive, thicker they come, a great
crowd, and I in the middle.

There can be no doubt that the embrace of "spirits" must be spiritual.
For these "dear friends" the poet plucks lilac, branch of pine, mOss from a
live oak, laurel leaves, and other "tokens" all open and ~isible products
of nature. But one token is reserved to be shared  D0y with those
"capable of loving" as the poet is capable:


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And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pond-side,
(O here I last saw him that tenderly loves me, and returns again never to
    separate from me,
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus 
    root shall
Interchange it youths with each other! let none render it back!)

It is of central significance that, of the products of nature enumerated by the poet to serve as
tokens to pass between friends, all are some visible portion of the plant, tree, or flower with the single
exception of that which is reserved for tender, intimate love the calamus root In this image all visible
nature, with its pungent odor, vivid color, and variety of form, symbolizes ordinary friendship,
beautiful and rewarding but relatively superficial; only that hidden from the eye, only that which is the
source of the visible manifestation, only the fountainhead itself of the spirit the heart may
serve to symbolize spiritual love of the depth the poet conceives. The drawing of the calamus root from
the still pond water suggests the origin of "Calamus" love in the serenity and abundant spirituality of
a great and deep soul. If the "pink-tinged" root suggests the source of the procreative power, if it
evokes a visual image of the "man-root," such physical suggestion in turn serves to symbolize the
virility and creativity of the poet's ideal love. These two attributes go far toward explaining the poet's
insistence in several poems on a relationship between his capacity for the love of comrades and his
capacity to write poetry.

A number of poems scattered throughout the remainder of "Calamus" utilize the central
vegetation symbol, exploiting the accumulated multiplicity of meaning and the ambiguity of the key
terms. "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" evokes a vivid image of a lone live oak standing apart
and "uttering joyous leaves of dark green." The poet has broken off a twig, "twined around it a little
moss" (again, a highly suggestive physical symbol), and has kept it as a "curious token" of "manly
love." But there is obviously more in the poem than a striking image: the tree is described in human
terms, particularly in its "uttering" of leaves. The tree, then, symbolizes a writer, perhaps a poet,
isolated and astonishingly self-sufficient in his isolation. As Whitman elsewhere in "Calamus" has
indicated that his own poems were possible only because of his "calamus love, it should not be
surprising that he stands amazed at the writer

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who can utter "joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover  near." In "The Prairie-Grass Dividing,"
the poet demands the "blades to rise of words, acts, beings," a fusion of the three symbolic meanings
of the spears of grass. Prairie grass, "copious and close," not confined to secluded spots, is a fit image
to merge with the calamus upon the final attainment of the poets ideal social state. The ambiguity of
"leaf is exploited in Here the Frailest Leaves of Me" and "A Leaf for Hand in Hand": in the first the
sturdiness, yet vulnerability, of the calamus spear renders possible the paradox essential to the
poem the "frailest," yet "strongest," leaves; in the latter, when the poet says, "I wish to infuse myself
among you till I see it common for you to walk hand in hand," the "I" is, at the same time, the poet
as his universal symbol grass and the poet as his compelling idea athletic love.

"Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone" is one of the few poems in "Calamus" completely
devoted to development of symbol: without lapse into direct statement or sheer assertion (as, for
example, in "Scented  Herbage of My Breast," where halfway through the poem the symbol is
dismissed as "capricious"). The opening line (which originally read "Roots and leaves unlike any but
themselves" )27  indicates, by the "alone," that the "Calamus" poems are as genuine and as authentic as
nature itself, that the love expressed in them is as real, yet ethereal, as "scents brought to men and
women from the wild woods and pond-side." The poet's basic technique is revealed symbolically in:
Gushes from the throats of birds hid in the foliage of trees as the sun is
risen,
Breezes of land and love set from living shores to you on the living sea,
   to you O sailors


As the breast-sorrel and pinks of love give rise to the "scents," as the birds originate their
"gushes" of song, as the land sends breezes out to sea, so the physical and concrete always suggest the
"spiritual corresponding." The almost systematic appeal to all the senses (the odor and sight of the
flowers, the sound of the birds, the touch of the breeze, the taste of "frostmellow'd berries") suggests
their important role in comprehending or achieving the spiritual. The

"Living shore" (the physical) sends forth breezes (a spiritual message)

27 Leaves of Grass ( 1830), p. 359. This was line 3 in the original version.

Page  78 
to the sailors on the 'living sea" (those who live by the spirit) Thus the calamus plant, its leaf and root,
offers an affirmation of spiritual love to those whose capacity for it is adequate. The
"lovebud," "put before you and within you," will unfold "on the old terms":
If you bring the warmth of the sun to them they will open and bring
    form, color, perfume, to you,
If you become the aliment and the wet they will become flowers, limit,
    tall branches and trees.

You can receive no more love than you are capable of giving: the largeness of your spirit
determines your return in spiritual love After all, a vessel can contain no more than its capacity.

Throughout "Calamus" ambiguity is used to create drama. Doubtless, Whitman has introduced the
physical image into his poems in such a way as to multiply his meaning or to blur it. One vividly sees,
hears, smells, tastes, or touches, and if he does no more he is prepared to question the poet's motives
and psychology. If, however, the reader understands that the suggestive or symbolic image is, in
Whitman's belief, the essence of poetry and that only the physical (what is knowable through the senses)
can be imaged, he may then realize that the tokens of amative love in "Calamus" are but metaphors, a
poetic attempt to associate with spiritual love the intensity and personal passion of traditional romantic
attachment. Mark Van Doren widely misses the mark when he questions Whitman's "democratic
dogmas" because of their basis in "abnormal" love. In the first place, Whitman did not proclaim
"dogmas" but rather suggested an ideal. In the second place, there exists no evidence that Whiman's
ideal is grounded in abnormality. Outside of "Calamus," in his prose, Whitman indicated rather clearly
that his belief in adhesiveness was an intense belief in the Christian concept of brotherly love. There are
only two ways of reading "Calamus' as a proclamation of the unwholesome: superficially, without going
beneath the surface meanings, without attention to the intentional ambiguity; or psychoanalytically, with
no attention whatever to either surface or symbolic meaning, but with intensive (and v~ild) speculation
as to personal motives and unintended revelations. surely neither of these methods is valid in the reading
and interpretation

 
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0f poetry. But even if one grants the as yet unproved charge against the poet, there is still the
necessity of showing that such a biographical fact is relevant to an evaluation of Whitman's ideas or
his poetry. Should knowledge of Keats's tuberculosis modify or condition in anyway our response to
"Ode to a Nightingale"?