434 EURAMERICA wonder that critics informed by modern political perspectives tend to reject Whitman’s comrades in favor of his strangers.37 However, despite their shared emphasis on Whitman’s cruising strangers, critics, such as Coviello and Frank, actually have rather different angles on the exact homopolitics thus derived. Adopting Benedict Anderson’s classic formulation of the nation—as a “political community” that “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellowmembers, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (1991: 5-6)—Coviello is intent on assimilating Whitman’s stranger relationality completely into it: “To be properly American is thus, as Whitman conceives it, to feel oneself related, in a quite intimate way, to a world of people not proximate or even known to oneself” (2005: 129). Although he later brings in the affective side (what he calls “affect-nation” [2014: 245]) as a revision of Anderson’s rather rational formulation and still cites Whitman as its prime illustration—“Whitman . . . tends to conceive such ‘confidence in community’ in markedly physical, passionate terms: for him, nationality can exist only as a quality of intimacy between persons who, though members of the same nation, are likely unknown to each other” (2005: 207, n. 6)—it is still very much toned down or safely circumscribed within the Andersonian terms by his repeated emphasis on the likely “unknowability” between nationals (most of whom, as he further clarifies, “have never seen one another” [129], thus making “the markedly physical, passionate terms” rather empty).38 37 Cf. Helen Vendler’s sharp observation: “Only after the physical fails does Whitman become a poet of intimacy with the invisible. Sometimes unable to secure, and always unable to sustain, actual sexual intimacy, Whitman is driven to invent an intimacy with the unseen” (2005: 33). Although Vendler is talking about “the lover-in-futurity,” I think it can also be applied to the public at large. 38 Although this is a somewhat unfortunate corollary of Coviello’s position on the matter, he does effect a certain desexualization of Whitman’s politics by this line of argument. He also fends off the assertion that Whitman’s agenda is to “make sex public” (the phrase originally from Warner [1996: 42]) thus: “in Whitman sex
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