Introduction Main body

. . . if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing, Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea,
For thus merely touching you is enough, is best.
Again there is the strong sense that it is the relationship, rather than the words which make up the poems, that is important. The intellect is dangerous, the words are emblematic and capricious. If the intellect reads the book in a library, "You con," he says, "at peril. . . . These leaves and me you will not understand." Understanding is not what may be expected from these poems; when you attempt to understand, to "con," just at the moment when "you should think you had unquestionably caught me, / Behold! / Already you see I have escaped from you." My poems, my leaves, the book which is identical with my self, will utterly elude the attempt to make a purely intellectual investigation:
For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it.
What I have to offer, he says, will not be acquired by reading, nor is it what we expect to gain from reading. Only a few "candidates for my love . . . will prove victorious"; and, when they have succeeded, what they have won will not "do good only," it will "do just as much evil, perhaps more." "For all is useless without that which . . . I hinted at," that is, the intensity of the merging, the relationship like that of physical love, the fusion in something as painful as death, which will open the poems to those few who in "Scented Herbage" sniffed the odor of the calamus.
These three poems, then, must be read together and seen as coexistent. They modify and refer to each other; the apparent disjunctions in subject among them make the reader modify his interpretations by ascertaining what the three poems have in common. They cause him to discover that love, the central concern of "In Paths Untrodden," death, the central concern of "Scented Herbage," and the poem-leaves, the central concern of "Whoever You Are," are all, for Whitman, closely related -- perhaps aspects of the same idea. These are not, in other words, different and distinct subjects or themes but a series of metaphors for the same thing, somewhat like the series of figures Donne employs for separation in "A Valediction⁵: Forbidding Mourning." As it would clearly be a mistake to think of that poem as one about death, gold and compasses, so it is a mistake to think of "Calamus" as a series of poems about death, love and homosexuality. To consider that "Calamus" is, as clearly as "A Valediction," a single unified work of art is to see that the error is obvious. The fourth poem in the group, "For You O Democracy" (it is essentially a condensation of "States," the fifth poem in the original, 1860, "Calamus"), introduces another theme or metaphor; it considers the social value of the reader-poet love-relation itself. The "democratic" poems of the section (''The Base of All Metaphysics," "I Hear It Was Charg'd Against Me," "A Leaf for Hand in Hand," "I Dream'd in a Dream," "To the East and to the West" -- not all of which deal exclusively with this subject) have frequently been called Whitman's way of rationalizing and sublimating his homosexual urges. The usual interpretation of these poems is that Whitman is saying in them that such urges are the basis of democracy and that the stronger they are the stronger society will be. That such poems are not in the same way as the others metaphors for aspects of the poetic process is obvious, but they are no more merely an afterthought or a rationalization for Walt Whitman's guilt feelings than the more purely literary poems. They are meant to consider the results Whitman anticipates from showing "candidates for his affection" what his affection involves. Those few who go down "paths untrodden" and become impregnated with the calamus scent will leaven a society, and the love which they then understand will "take control of all" and "will make the continent indissoluble," "make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks." In these four poems, then, combined with "These I Singing in Spring," which was the fourth poem in 1860 and the fifth by 1891, Whitman announces his subject and his basic metaphoric structure. The subject is the origin and nature of his poems, the method by which they must be approached, and the results of such an approach. The metaphoric structure involves an identification of the poet-reader relationship with death and with the sort of love signified by manly attraction, by adhesiveness; this is in turn signified by the calamus plant, which in itself joins all the levels of the discussion. It is the poems, the love which they embody, the phallus, the hair of the chest and the growth on the grave; it is also the manuscript written with the calamus pen. These poems create, then, in the first few pages of the section, the basic conceptual structure upon which all of "Calamus" must be read, which all of "Calamus" refers to and modifies. Thus it is a superficial and isolated reading which sees merely or primarily homosexuality in such lines as these from "These I Singing in Spring":