Introduction Main body

Olagunju Olaoluwa.
"Whitman's Poetics and the Unity of 'Calamus".
THE SECTION OF Leaves of Grass called "Calamus" made its first appearance in the book in the third edition, in 1860. Somewhat surprisingly, it seems to have caused little controversy at the time; the first, and strongest, reaction to the 1860 edition concerned the "Enfans d'Adam" (later "Children of Adam") section. To the twentieth century, however, the homosexual (or, to use Gay Wilson Allen's word, "homoerotic") implications of Whitman's celebration of "manly love" and the directness of the phallic symbolism of "Calamus" have seemed more important to an understanding of Whitman -- and much more psychologically interesting -- than the somewhat programmatic heterosexuality of "Children of Adam." Critics and scholars have most often considered the poems of both sections primarily as clues to Whitman's psychology, rendering the history of the criticism of "Calamus" almost entirely the history of a dialectic of biographical theories, in which each poem is treated as a fairly direct "confession" -- an inference encouraged, of course, by Whitman's pose as an unsophisticated "bard" -- and without considering its relation to the other poems in the section and to the section as a whole. That this is critically indefensible is suggested by Whitman's own treatment of the poems⁴. "Calamus" is one of the sections of the 1860 Leaves of Grass which survived essentially intact the repeated and drastic revisions Whitman undertook between then and 1891 (the other is "Children of Adam"). Clearly, Whitman thought of the poems in the "Calamus" section as representing some sort of integral group.2 More important, however, than any inference about how Whitman thought of "Calamus" is the fact that the hypothesis that the section is an organic whole leads to a fuller and richer reading of the poems themselves.
"Calamus" is much more, and much more complex, than merely an expression of Whitman's homoerotic tendencies, and a consideration of the section can restrict itself to the implications of the clearly homoerotic passages only by ignoring much that is of real importance in determining how those passages are to be understood. There have been a number of valuable approaches toward the poems along the lines I am suggesting,3 but the first really ambitious attempt to deal with the "Calamus" poems as an artistic whole was James Miller's article "'Calamus': The Leaf and the Root,"4 which proposes that there are five major themes in the section and that they are fused through the ambiguity of the metaphors, particularly that of the calamus plant itself. Miller's article is valuable in that he maintained for the first time that "Calamus" is a unified whole, separate from its ultimate psychological origins and with its own consistent artistic structure. But his reading is still finally unsatisfying; the five "themes" he suggests are simply too many and too unrelated to each other to be unified merely by the "ambiguity" of the central metaphor. Roy Harvey Pearce, however, has suggested a principle which can be used to discover the essential unity of theme of "Calamus." In the course of explaining why he prefers the third edition of Leaves of Grass to the others, Pearce maintains that in this edition the "I" includes the reader and makes the reader a poet. "Children of Adam," Pearce says, tells us how it is -- what it means, what it costs -- to be a maker of poems, and the "Calamus" sequence how it is to be a reader of poems. In the first instance the analogue is procreation; in the second it is community.5 The idea that the section forms a discussion of the poetic process is vitally important. It is this, stated somewhat differently than Pearce states it, which is the organizing principle with reference to which all the Poems of "Calamus" must be read. "Calamus," then, is not an autobiographical "confession," not a celebration of homosexuality or homoeroticism, and not a political program which advocates manly love as the foundation of democracy. It incorporates elements of all these things, but they are at bottom merely the raw material Whitman employs in a statement, organized organically rather than logically, of the origin and nature of Whitman's own poetry -- how it should be read and by whom, and what effects its reading is likely to have. It is in the "Calamus" poems that it becomes most clear what Whitman's words imply when, for instance, in "So Long" he identifies himself with his book: