By M. Jimmie Killingsworth
This has been one of my goals for a long time, since
about 1975 in fact, when I began work on a M.A. thesis at the University of Tennessee. It
actually began earlier than the thesis, when I was looking for a poem to work on in F.
DeWolfe Miller's Whitman seminar in the Winter term of 1975. I was drawn to "I Sing
the Body Electric" because I recognized the title from an old Ray Bradbury story that
always fascinated me. (Having been diverted into canonical and mainstream literature,
Išve only recently found my way back to science fiction. I teach a course in it and have
been amazed at the way the sci fi writers literalize the metaphors of the nineteenth
century, when modern technology was young, and thereby open new insights into
technological tropes like "the body electric.")
On first reading in 1975, what struck me about Whitman's poem was that it seemed so up to date. It was 120 years old and yet it struck the tone of the sexual revolution of the 1970s. The odd thing was that as I studied the historical context of the poem, it came to seem older, to recede into a past that made it more understandable but safe and distant.
That distance accounts in some measure for the hardness and flatness of the prose which I am able to bring to passages like the following--a piece of a work in progress that I hope to contribute to David Reynold's collection of essays on historical approaches to Whitman (to be published by Oxford University Press). It is emphatically not the whole story. Much of Whitman's treatment of sexuality can be nicely contextualized and held at a distance. Much cannot. For more on what cannot, check out the page on exploring the textuality of Whitman's gayness.
There is hardly any documentation here. For information on the sources of quoted material and references, see the linked bibliographical essay (under construction).
Click here to return to the main page of The Body Electronic.
Historical critics have gradually come to see that Walt Whitman's striking images of the "body electric"--the human body charged with sexual energy, open to entreaties of companions male and female, driven by consuming desire, containing the sources of psychological as well as political power--were not exclusively the product and property of an inspired individual but were "socially constructed." In Whitman's time, the sexualized body became an increasing source of both anxiety and fascination fully acknowledged and explicitly voiced in medical writing, social purity pamphlets, self-help books, and popular science, as well as pulp fiction, pornography, and underground confessional literature. Only a literary history focused entirely on the literature of parlors, school rooms, and high-brow literary journals could view Whitman's "poetry of the body" as unalloyed in its originality.
* * * * * * * * * *
The "poetry of the body" predominates in the first three editions of Leaves of Grass. Sexual themes figure prominently in all the major poems--"Song of Myself," "The Sleepers," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," and "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"--and form the basis for two major groupings of poems that appear in all editions after 1860: "Children of Adam," dedicated to heterosexual attraction and "procreation," and "Calamus," dedicated to "the love of comrades" or "manly love." In "Song of Myself," the first poem in the first edition of 1855 and a key text in every edition, the poet vows to bring forth "many long dumb" and "forbidden voices": "Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,/ Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd" (WCP 211). For him, life is rooted in sex, which connects human experience to previous generations, to future generations, and to the natural order of the world with its evolutionary forces:
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. (WCP 190)
The characters of the early poems--the woman hidden behind the blinds, longingly watching the young men bathing by the shore in Section 11 of "Song of Myself"; the restless dreamers of "The Sleepers"; the young man seized by the impulse to masturbate in "Spontaneous Me"; the Adamic hero in "From Pent-up Aching Rivers"; the lonely sufferer of unrequited love or the eager friend in the "Calamus" poems--all seek the comfort of human sympathy and the satisfaction of strong desires. In celebrating the conditions of desire and in urging men and women toward the frank recognition and resolution of their desires, Whitman offers a utopic vision of the completed human individual and expresses a faith that a race of such beings could create the world anew, giving birth to yet "greater heroes and bards . . . sons and daughters fit for these States . . . perfect men and women" (WCP 259-60).
"Sex contains all," the poet proclaims in "A Woman Waits for Me" (WCP 258), one of the central poems in "Children of Adam," controversially titled "Poem of Procreation" when it first appeared in the 1856 Leaves. On the grounds that sexual themes were central to the overall plan of Leaves of Grass, Whitman refused to remove this and other poems from his ever-growing volume, even on the advice of Emerson, whom he once called "Master." And though he ceased to celebrate sex with the same intensity in poems written after the Civil War and revised old poems for later editions to de-emphasize the frankly physical element, he continued to insist that sexual themes were essential to his poetic project and that sexual experience was both transcendental and fundamental in human life. In old age, he told his friend and biographer Horace Traubel that "the eager physical hunger, the wish of that which we will not allow to be freely spoken of is still the basis of all that makes life worthwhile . . . Sex: Sex: Sex"; in an organic metaphor suggestive of the place of sex in the whole scheme of his Leaves, he called it "the root of roots: the life below the life" (WWC 3.452-53).
The historical significance of Whitman's concern with sexuality is deepened by his association of physical life with democratic politics. The poem "I Sing the Body Electric," the first version of which appeared in the 1855 Leaves, provides a kind of manifesto on the political power of sex. In twin sections on "a man's body at auction" and "a woman's body at auction," the poet associates the evil of both slavery and prostitution with the dualistic thinking that favors the soul over the body. A society that allows the body to be treated as "corrupt" ends up by "corrupting" itself, treating abstractions like social class, education, and money as more important than material life and human health. As the strongest foundation for the equal treatment of all moral beings, Whitman restores the body to a position equal to, even identical with the soul. At the end of a long catalogue praising the parts of the body, he proclaims, "O I say these are not the parts and the poems of the body only, but of the soul,/ O I say now these are the soul" (WCP 190). The aesthetic significance of Whitman's democratic sexual politics, suggested in his identification of the "parts" of the body as "poems" in and of themselves, is fully developed in the famous lines of "Spontaneous Me" that identify the poem with the penis:
The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)
The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me,
This poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all men carry,
(Know once for all, avow'd on purpose, wherever are men like me, are our lusty lurking
masculine poems) . . . . (WCP 260)
The centrality of sex in Leaves of Grass and Whitman's experimentation in language, above all his free verse (almost as unnerving as free love to many readers) and his audacity in exploring metaphors and other tropes, earned him the contempt of many reviewers in his own time but also made him a hero among less conventional contemporaries and among later critics. An 1856 review in Boston's Christian Examiner argues, "in point of style, the book is an impertinence toward the English language; and in point of sentiment, an affront upon the recognized morality of respectable people. Both its language and thought seem to have just broken out of Bedlam. It sets off upon a sort of distracted philosophy, and openly deifies the bodily organs, senses, and appetites." A British reviewer of the same year calls Whitman "rough, uncouth, and vulgar" and predicts, "The depth of his indecencies will be the grave of his fame." By contrast, and typical of twentieth-century criticism in the modernist vein, F. O. Matthiessen's highly influential American Renaissance (1941) understands sex to be the focal point of Whitman's largely successful "fusion of form and content." In Matthiessen's view, Whitman is unique even among the great artists of the mid-nineteenth century precisely because he believed that poetic expression was rooted deeply in the experiences of the physical body. This faith allowed Whitman to create a poetry more powerful and "earthy" than that of other nineteenth-century poets: "Whitman's language is more earthy because he was aware, in a way that distinguished him from every other writer of the day, of the power of sex." The earthiness also proved attractive to many readers in Whitman's own day, even some whose own writing steered clear of sex and who may have had personal qualms about the intensity of Whitman's treatment. In a famous private letter, which Whitman made public in a notorious act of self-promotion, Emerson praised the "free and brave thought" of the 1855 edition, though in an equally famous exchange, he urged Whitman to omit several of the "Children of Adam" poems because they would hurt sales. Thoreau, with his own blend of mental ruggedness and personal prudery, confided to a friend his impression of the 1855 Leaves:
There are two or three pieces in the book which are disagreeable, to say the least: simply sensual. He does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason. No doubt there have always been dens where such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to compete with their inhabitants. But even on this side he has shown more truth than any American or Modern that I know. I found his poem exhilarating, encouraging. As for its sensuality,--and it may turn out to be less sensual than it appears,--I do not so much wish that those parts were not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read them without harm, that is, without understanding them.
The general reception of Leaves of Grass in the nineteenth century was surprisingly mixed. Banned in Boston in the 1880s, the book was still read and admired by many ladies and gentlemen in Victorian England.
In the face of old stereotypes about the prudery of Victorian culture, historical scholarship has demonstrated in the last two decades that Whitman's book was not unique in dealing with sex in a forthright and even celebratory manner. Whitman was a journalist before he was a poet, and in this capacity, he encountered all manner of speakers and writers hawking self-help and social reform, everything from sex education and hydrotherapy to women's rights and free love. He was particularly attracted to alternative medical practitioners, including the phrenologists who, in locating aspects of character in physical attributes and in proclaiming the need to dispense with the "conspiracy of silence" surrounding bodily functions and sexual acts, influenced the poet deeply and permanently. In addition, biographical critics have demonstrated Whitman's familiarity with pulp fictions and perhaps harder forms of pornography. His own early experiments in fiction, in his magazine stories and his temperance novel Franklin Evans, reveal scenes and characters that could have been lifted directly from this literary rough trade. The temperance movement itself emphasized bodily purification but also did its part to heighten public awareness of the body and contribute to emerging discourses of the social purity cause with its twin peaks of anti-prostitution and abolition, which Whitman builds into the structure of "I Sing the Body Electric." All of these early nineteenth-century discourses served to foreground the human body and confound the distinction between public and private, a distinction likewise undermined in the best of Whitman's poems, notably "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers."
Whitman's achievement consists partly in bringing these discourses into "dialogue" with the poetic tradition, expanding the vocabulary as well as the typical subject matter of the poetic canon. In a famous witticism, Emerson said Leaves of Grass blended the New York Tribune with the Bhagavad Gita, a remark that globalizes the regional assessment of an early review by Charles Eliot Norton, who called the poems a "mixture of Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism." Both David Reynolds and Christopher Beach use M. M. Bakhtin's theory of novelization to explain Whitman's stylistic and formal innovations, his unique blending of multiple "voices" from the "sociolect" of his times to create an artistic "idiolect," in the terms Beach appropriates from the French theorist Roland Barthes.
Even with his Bakhtinian "heteroglossia," however, his shifting from conventional poetic or biblical language to technical jargon borrowed from the sciences and then to street talk, Whitman is not altogether unique in his historical context. His favorite medical writers often "defamiliarized" the language of science and social purity with odd concepts and metaphors. Using a term that applies equally well to Whitman's style, historians have referred to these medical writers as "eclectic" in training, philosophy, and discourse. One of the strange concepts they developed that Whitman borrowed directly was the idea that sexual attraction was literally electric. The notion appears throughout the writings of Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, founders of the phrenological firm Fowler and Wells, which employed the journalist Whitman to write for its magazine Life Illustrated and assisted in promoting and distributing the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass. Dr. Edward H. Dixon, whose name and address appear in a Whitman notebook of 1856, was the author of a book entitled The Organic Law of the Sexes: Positive and Negative Electricity and the Abnormal Conditions that Impair Vitality (1861). In an earlier book, Woman and Her Diseases, the sixth edition of which Whitman reviewed in 1847, Dixon appropriates a metaphor from the history of photography, another fascination of the poet's. The soul or moral nature of a parent, Dixon explains in a discussion of heredity, is "daguerreotyped upon the brain or nervous system of his offspring." The admixture of metaphysical, medical, and technological discourses in these writings re-emerges in poems like "I Sing the Body Electric":
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. (WCP 250)
It is safe to say that the poet outdid his sources in the power and variety of his tropes and the intensity of his tone, as Christopher Beach demonstrates in his reading of "I Sing the Body Electric": "In his aggressive mixing of technical or medical diction with a level of more intimate and personal observation . . ., Whitman rhetorically elides the difference between social and personal forms of discourse, making possible a further synthesis . . . of poetic language (rhythmically varied, imagistically dense, linguistically creative) and the precision of scientific or anatomical discourse."
But Whitman did not only merge diverse discourses on sexuality into a newly powerful poetic whole; he laid the groundwork for a new discourse of sexual consciousness that went well beyond the existing discourses of his own time. Homosexuality had no public discourse in mid-nineteenth-century America. Even legal writings on the topic were evasive. Blackstone's famous Commentaries on the Laws of England, for example, referred to sodomy (itself a vague biblical reference to "unnatural" sex acts) as "a crime not fit to be named among Christians," "the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature." The Latin version of Blackstone's phrase appeared in one of the earliest reviews of Leaves of Grass. In the New York Criterion of November 10, 1855, Rufus Griswold writes of Whitman's book that it is "impossible to convey . . . even the most faint idea of its style and contents, and of our disgust and detestation of them, without employing language that cannot be pleasing to ears polite." At the risk of offending his audience, however, he undertakes a "stern duty": "The records of crime show that many monsters have gone on in impunity, because the exposure of their vileness was attended with too great delicacy. Peccatum illud horrible, inter Christianos non nominandum."
Griswold's remarks and his invocation of the Latin formula are highly significant. Mid-century references to Whitman's project on male-male love are practically nonexistent. By his old age, Whitman was regularly attracting the interest of younger homosexual intellectuals, especially Englishmen, who were quick to claim Whitman as a pioneer in developing a public discourse that comprehended gay life. But his poems on "manly love" were all but ignored in the 1850s and 1860s whereas his poems that celebrated "procreation" and heterosexual attraction, such as "A Woman Waits for Me," were regularly and heartily condemned and discussed widely in public and private writings. Griswold's rhetoric suggests that while careful readers could discern a special erotic intensity toward other men in Whitman's poems, they may have been afraid or "too delicate" to broach the topic.
Interestingly, Griswold's censure, based on an apparent perception of homoerotic tendencies, applies not to the now infamous "Calamus" poems, which did not appear until 1860, but to the 1855 poems. As Robert K. Martin suggests, poems like "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers" provide plenty of pre-Calamus passages in the mode of homosexual dreams and visions. Moreover, as Byrne Fone and Michael Moon have demonstrated, the early fiction shows us that Whitman was working with homoerotic themes years before he wrote the first line of Leaves of Grass. Still, as the rest of this chapter demonstrates, the "Calamus" poems remain rhetorically distinct from the earlier poems and stories. Even though homosexual acts and fantasies appear to inform the scenes of the early fiction and provide subject matter and inspiration for the defamiliarizing tropes of the 1855 and 1856 Leaves, the 1860 introduction of "Calamus" signals the opening of a new discourse frontier, the poetic province of the first gay American.
Click here to read a bibliographical essay on the sources of these paragraphs. (document pending)
Click here to go the page on exploring the textuality of Whitman's gayness. (document pending)
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Copyright J. Killingsworth, 1998