"Man's words" and manly comradeship: language, politics, and homosexuality in Walt Whitman's works.

Abstract

Critical assessments of Walt Whitman's works either emphasize his sexual themes while ignoring his political ideas or they focus on the poet's politics but ignore his poetics of corporeality. Recent studies that do discuss both politics and sexuality in Whitman's works do not devote much attention if any to the poet's theory of language as it appears in his An American Primer. This essay explores the complex intersections among sexuality, politics, and language in Whitman's works, illustrating how the poet consistently correlated his linguistic, sexual, and political metaphors, constantly relating the health and the sexual potency of the male body with the power of language, the efficacy of literature, and the strength of the states in the United States. Underlying these multiple metaphors and poetic intentions is the poet's homosexual vision. It constitutes the basis of his linguistic theory, his hope of an ideal democratic union, and his plea for sexual equality. To Whitman, America needed male-to-male friendships to free it from materialistic vulgarities and to ensure its perpetuation.