Whitman’s Homotextuality, Homopolitics, and Homonationalism 425 “Calamus,”20 the scene of a forlorn lament for the loss of someone with whom the speaker is clearly in love—which strangely becomes that of a shameful identity crisis: 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? Is there even one other like me—distracted—his friend, his lover, lost to him? (1860-1861: 355, C9; [Hours Continuing Long]) While it would not make much sense if this were just an ordinary heart-breaking scene of loosing a friend/lover, could this really signify what it seems, namely the emerging awareness of someone interpellating himself as a member of a certain “sexual” minority? It surely appears uncannily similar to what later homosexuals usually feel when first learning who they really are as a result of having strong feelings for someone society forbids (i.e., people of the same sex); and deeply astonished at finding this, they wonder whether they are the only ones who feel this way, and whether there are others who feel the same (i.e., people like them). Perhaps for Whitman the answers were already affirmative, for in the “secluded spot” where the speaker retreats in the opening poem of “Calamus,” he is not alone but “talked to here by tongues aromatic” (18601861: 341, C1); and later, in a more substantial scene recalling 20 The other two are C8 ([Long I Thought That Knowledge Alone Would Suffice]) and C16 ([Who Is Reading This?]), which, along with this one, all belong to the original twelve “Live Oak with Moss” poems that form the basis of the “Calamus” cluster. For a critical analysis of the “Live Oak” poems and their transmutations into the “Calamus” cluster, see Erkkila (2011: 99-130). As to why these three poems were later deleted from the cluster (since the 1867 edition), Erkkila thinks it “suggests that he [Whitman] sought . . . to suppress the more anguished dimensions of his love for men and to blur the distinction between the public poet and private lover he set forth in ‘Long I Thought That Knowledge Alone Would Suffice’” (135-136)—the last point is of particular interest here and for the next section.
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