418 EURAMERICA Besides, . . . 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. (1892: 285, n., my emphases) However, except for its early appreciation by the American liberal, leftist, or anarchist thinkers—for example, Vernon Louis Parrington, the reputed founder of American Studies, praised Whitman for bringing “fraternity” (i.e., “the feeling of comradeship”) back into democracy and “exalting it by making it warm and human and social” (“Flesh is kin to flesh”) (1930: 76-77)6 —the two sides of this corporeal-political project have been largely segregated in later readings and appropriations. While political attention to Whitman’s democracy largely dropped the same-sex aspect, probably due to the establishment and stigmatization of homosexuality, later gay recoveries of Whitman tend to give, if ever, no more than a nod, and more often dismiss it outright as nothing but disguise, diversion, or substitute for homosexual love that was thought to truly want expression but could not be given directly.7 More recently, in addition to certain prominent scholars who have made particular efforts to rearticulate Whitman’s intra-male intimacy with politics,8 some critical efforts have explored more 6 While Parrington is an example of the early liberal/left appreciations of Whitman, for the anarchist see Kissack (2008). 7 See Cady (1978: 11) and Railton (1995: 15) for examples across nearly two decades. Gay critics’ dismissal of the political part is rather symptomatic of the privatizing tendency of modern sexuality episteme that not just takes the personal to be the political, but only the personal to be the political. 8 Namely, Grossman (1990), Erkkila (2005: 131-154; i.e., the chapter titled “Whitman and the Homosexual Republic,” originally published in 1994), and Reynolds (1995: 401-403). See also Erkkila’s “Introduction” and Grossman’s “Epilogue” to their co-edited volume Breaking Bounds (Erkkila & Grossman, 1996) as well as Erkkila (2020: 201-223; i.e., the chapter titled “Public Love: Whitman and Political Theory,” originally published in 2002). However, Erkkila’s (1989: 178-182) slightly earlier Whitman the Political Poet, which was crucial for the repoliticization of Whitman after so long, only tangentially touches upon the topic in the chapter promisingly titled “Democracy and (Homo) Sexual Desire.”
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