Introduction Main body

Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man . . .
It is I you hold and who holds you . . .
And it is in "Calamus" that the poetic possibilities of this idea and this image are most richly and satisfyingly worked out.
The first problem in interpreting "Calamus" is presented by the nature of its central image, the calamus plant itself. It is usually taken to be a phallic symbol. But if it is primarily that, it is a strangely complicated and ambiguous one. It is, for instance, the blossom which has a phallic appearance, but Whitman never mentions the blossom with this meaning. The plant itself is a large, coarse grass and as such its use obviously relates to Whitman's other symbolic uses of "grass" in Leaves of Grass. There is no reason why it should be more apparently a phallic symbol than any of the other grass referred to in the book. The root of the plant, which seems most clearly of sexual significance for Whitman,7 is most remarkable for its odor and for its medicinal properties. Had Whitman desired an exclusively or obviously phallic object, he need not have chosen one so ambiguous or with so many other, more obvious, associations. Indeed, the ambiguity of the calamus as a symbol is a central concern of a number of interpretations of the poems.8 If the section is viewed appropriately, however, all the ambiguities point to one subject: the poems themselves. It is his poetry, his book, which is the tenor to which all the varying vehicles of Whitman's complex metaphor relate.9 Starting with this interpretation of its central symbol, it is possible to argue that "Calamus" is an ars poetica in which Whitman explains what act is being performed in the writing and the reading of Leaves of Grass. The best way to demonstrate this is to turn to the poems themselves and show how it is actually accomplished.
The usual reading of "In Paths Untrodden," the poem which begins the section, does not suggest that it is likely to introduce a discussion of the poetic process. According to this reading, Whitman in the poem "composes" a place where, away from the moral "standards hitherto publish'd" and "in paths untrodden," he can cast aside the moral strictures of society, speaking "as I would not dare elsewhere," and, talking directly about his homosexuality, "celebrate the need of comrades." As long as he is thus removed from social norms, he will "sing no songs but those of manly attachment." It is also suggested that he finds himself "in paths untrodden" precisely because he is a homosexual, that part of the reason for the selection of the calamus as a symbol is that it does grow in out-of-the-way places. This reading, however, does not go to the heart of the poem; it only uncovers the basic metaphor. What Whitman is saying is, at bottom, more like this: now that the reader and Whitman himself have come (perhaps by way of reading the rest of the book, particularly the preceding "Children of Adam") to "paths untrodden," he can explain the "secret" of their coming. Now that they are in areas of literary expression where not many come, he can "explain the secret of my nights and days," the secret which lies behind and within all his poetry. "My soul, . . . the soul of the man I speak for," he says, "rejoices in comrades." This clear distinction between the poet and the man he speaks for suggests a distinction between the sort of rejoicing in comrades which characterized Walt Whitman and what the phrase means when used by "the bard." Rejoicing in comrades is, for him, rejoicing in readers; rejoicing in the relationship between reader and writer; rejoicing specifically in the kind of relationship created by his sort of poetry. That such a reading seems strained, when this poem is considered in isolation, is obvious. But when the poem is considered as part of a unity which also includes a poem like "Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand," with its direct identification of the poet with his book, the interpretation seems much less far-fetched. And "Scented Herbage of My Breast," the second poem, announces as clearly as can be that what is found "in the growth by margins of pond-waters" is Whitman's poetry and all that is associated with it. "Scented Herbage" begins, in fact, with Whitman's usual identification of the leaves and the poetry: