Walt Whitman's Songs of Male Intimacy and Love

by Whitman, Walt; Erkkila, Betsy

• ISBN13: 9781587299582
• ISBN10: 1587299585
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Iowa Pr

Summary

In his 1859 "Live Oak, with Moss," Walt Whitmanrs"s unpublished sheaf of twelve poems on manly passion, the poet dreams of a city where men who love men can live and love openly. The revised "Live Oak, with Moss" poems became "Calamus," Whitmanrs"s cluster of poems on "adhesive" and manly love, comradeship, and democracy, inLeaves of Grass. Commemorating both the first publication of the "Calamus" poems and the little-known manuscript of notebook poems out of which the "Calamus" cluster grew, Whitman scholar Betsy Erkkila brings together in a single edition for the first time the "Live Oak, with Moss" poems, the 1860 "Calamus" poems, and the final 1881 "Calamus" poems. In addition to honoring the sesquicentennial of the "Calamus" cluster, she celebrates the ongoing legacy of Whitmanrs"s songs of manly passion, sex, and love.The volume begins with Whitmanrs"s elegantly handwritten manuscript of the "Live Oak, with Moss" poems, printed side by side with a typeset transcription and followed by a facsimile of the 1860 version of the "Calamus" poems. The concluding section reprints the final version of the "Calamus" poems from the 1881 edition ofLeaves of Grass. In an afterword, Erkkila discusses the radical nature of these poems in literary, sexual, and social history; the changes Whitman made in the "Live Oak" and "Calamus" poems in the postCivil War and Reconstruction years; the literary, political, and other contests surrounding the poems; and the constitutive role the poems have played in the emergence of modern heterosexual and homosexual identity in the United States and worldwide. The volume closes with a selected bibliography of works that have contributed to the critical and interpretive struggles around Whitmanrs"s man-loving life.One hundred and fifty years after Whitmanrs"s brave decision to speak publicly about a fully realized democracy, his country is still locked in a struggle over the rights of homosexuals. These public battles have been at the very center of controversies over the life, work, and legacy of Walt Whitman, Americars"s (and the worldrs"s) major poet of democracy and its major singer of what he called "manly love" in all its moods. Together the poems in this omnibus volume affirm his creation of a radical new language designed to convey and affirm the poetrs"s man love.