Seeds of Quakerism at the Roots of Leaves of Grass

Abstract

Explores Whitman's poetry in the light of Quakerism, presenting both those Quaker concepts "directly relevant to the vision of democracy that Whitman wanted to promote" and those not found in the poet's vision; contends that in Leaves of Grass--especially the "Calamus" poems--Whitman sought to "win for the gay minority in nineteenth-century America what the Quaker minority had won in England in the seventeenth," and that what is missing of Quakerism in the poems leaves "his democratic programme partial and unfinished."