Whitman's “Calamus”: The Leaf and the Root

Abstract

No section in Leaves of Grass has received so much close attention and been the center of so much discussion and controversy as “Calamus.” Friends of Whitman, particularly the “hot little prophets,” have indignantly defended the section against the charge of “indecency,” usually by raising the opposite cry, “purity,” and by citing Whitman's own saintlike, spiritual life as proof that the poems could not be unwholesome. William Sloane Kennedy calls “Calamus” “Whitman's beautiful democratic poems of friendship” and adds, “A genuine lover speaks in the Calamus pieces: a great and generous heart there pours forth its secret. Set side by side with these glowing confessions, other writings on friendship seem frigid and calculating.” At the opposite extreme is Mark Van Doren's recent judgment which has been widely influential: “His [Whitman's] democratic dogmas—of what validity are they when we consider that they base themselves upon the sentiment of ‘manly love,‘ and that manly love is neither more nor less than an abnormal and deficient love?” To the serious reader of “Calamus,” the “manly love” which recurs both as a term and an idea is of such genuine poetic complexity as to render it a good deal more than “abnormal” and considerably less than “deficient.”