Calamus (poems)

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The "Calamus" poems are a cluster of poems in Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. These poems celebrate and promote "the manly love of comrades". Most critics believe [1] [2] [3] that these poems are Whitman's clearest expressions in print of his ideas about homoerotic male love.

Contents

Genesis and "Live Oak With Moss"

The first evidence of the poems that were to become the "Calamus" cluster is an unpublished manuscript sequence of twelve poems entitled "Live Oak With Moss," written in or before spring 1859. [4] These poems were all incorporated in Whitman's 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, but out of their original sequence. These poems seem to recount the story of a relationship between the speaker of the poems and a male lover. Even in Whitman's intimate writing style, these poems, read in their original sequence, seem unusually personal and candid in their disclosure of love and disappointment, and this manuscript has become central to arguments about Whitman's homoeroticism or homosexuality. This sequence was not known in its original manuscript order until a 1953 article by Fredson Bowers. [5]

"Calamus" sequence

In the 1860 third edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman included the twelve "Live Oak" poems along with others to form a sequence of 45 untitled numbered poems. This sequence as written celebrates many aspects of "comradeship" or "adhesive love," Whitman's term, borrowed from phrenology to describe male same-sex attraction. [6] This attraction is presented in its political, spiritual, metaphysical, and personal phases—Whitman offering it as the backbone of future nations, the root of religious sentiments, the solution to the big questions of life, and as a source of personal anguish and joy.

The 1860 edition contains three poems that Whitman later edited out of the sequence, including the very personal Calamus 8, "Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice me," and Calamus 9, "Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted." Whitman's constant editing of his works meant that many of the other poems changed and shifted position in the editions that appeared during his lifetime. By the 1881–82 edition, the number of poems had been reduced to 39. Some critics contend that Whitman's edits tended to reduce some of his most personal and specific disclosures, possibly in an attempt to make the sequence more attractive to a wider audience. [7] Others, such as Betsy Erkkila, note that Whitman retained some equally personal poems for the 1867 edition and view his editorial decisions as a function of Whitman building a particular national persona for himself. [8]

The meaning of Calamus as a symbol

Acorus calamus AcorusCalamus.jpg
Acorus calamus

This cluster of poems contains a number of images and motifs that are repeated throughout, notably the Calamus root itself. Acorus calamus or Sweet Flag is a marsh-growing plant similar to a cat-tail. Whitman continues through this one of the central images of Leaves of Grass – Calamus is treated as a specific example of the grass that he writes of elsewhere. Some scholars have pointed out, as reasons for Whitman's choice, the phallic shape of what Whitman calls the "pink-tinged roots" of Calamus, its mythological association with male same-sex love, and the allegedly mind-altering effects of the root. [9] The root was chiefly chewed at the time as a breath-freshener and to relieve stomach complaints.

Contents

Calamus cluster includes the following poems:

  1. In Paths Untrodden
  2. Scented Herbage of My Breast
  3. Whoever You Are, Holding Me Now in Hand
  4. These I, Singing in Spring
  5. A Song
  6. Not Heaving From My Ribb'd Breast Only
  7. Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances
  8. The Base of All Metaphysics
  9. Recorders Ages Hence
  10. When I Heard at the Close of the Day
  11. Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me?
  12. Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone
  13. Not Heat Flames Up and Consumes
  14. Trickle, Drops
  15. City of Orgies
  16. Behold This Swarthy Face
  17. I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
  18. To a Stranger
  19. This Moment, Yearning and Thoughtful
  20. I Hear It Was Charged Against Me
  21. The Prairie-Grass Dividing
  22. We Two Boys Together Clinging
  23. A Promise to California
  24. Here the Frailest Leaves of Me
  25. When I Peruse the Conquer'd Fame
  26. What Think You I Take My Pen in Hand?
  27. A Glimpse
  28. No Labor-Saving Machine
  29. A Leaf for Hand in Hand
  30. To the East and to the West
  31. Earth! My Likeness!
  32. I Dream'd in a Dream
  33. Fast Anchor'd, Eternal, O Love!
  34. Sometimes With One I Love
  35. That Shadow, My Likeness
  36. Among the Multitude
  37. To a Western Boy
  38. O You Whom I Often and Silently Come
  39. Full of Life, Now [1]

References

  1. 1 2 Calamus: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature: An International anthology, David Galloway, Christian Sabisch
  2. ↑ Whitman's "Calamus": A Rhetorical Prehistory of the First Gay American-J. Killingsworth Archived 2007-05-26 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ↑ Walt Whitman, Prophet of Gay Liberation
  4. ↑ Alan Helms, "Live Oak With Moss (1953–1954)." Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Eds. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings. New York: Garland, 1998. 400–401.
  5. ↑ Bowers, Fredson. "Whitman's Manuscripts for the Original 'Calamus' Poems." Studies in Bibliography 6(1953): 257–265.
  6. ↑ Miller, James E. Jr. "Calamus." Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Eds. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings. New York: Garland, 1998. 95–97.
  7. ↑ Raleigh, Richard "["Hours Continuing Long."] Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Eds. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings. New York: Garland, 1998. 282–283.
  8. ↑ Erkkila, Betsy (1996). Whitman the Political Poet. Oxford UP. p. 261. ISBN   9780195113808.
  9. ↑ Auclair, Tracy. "The Language of Drug Use in Whitman's 'Calamus' Poems." Papers on Language and Literature 40 (Summer 2004), 227–259.
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