|
|
| |
 |
| << previous
summary |
timeline |
next
summary>> |
|
Biography: Walt
Whitman (1819-1892)
| Now revered as one of America's great poets,
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a controversial figure in his own time. When Whitman
published the first version of his greatest book, Leaves of Grass, in 1855,
the poems it contained praised the sensuality and the
comradeship of the common man. Whitman's rough-hewn celebration of the body and sweat and
father-juice was shocking to most of his readers. |
Walt with lover Peter
Doyle |
| The few reviewers that liked the
book admired Whitman's vision of America as a classless society and his adulation of
America's working stiffs, but others suspected that the "comradely love" Whitman
venerated covered darker motives, perhaps even the "Peccatum illud horribile, inter
Christianos non nominandum" - the horrible sin not to be named among Christians.
Whitman had a series of male lovers, but he
worked hard to keep his relationships secret so when he was pressed by an English devotee
to answer whether comradely love meant "physical intimacies," Whitman wrote back
to say he found such "morbid inferences" damnable. In spite of Whitman's
protestations, many men found the love of comrades an apt description of their own sexual
desires. Whitman's example inspired admirers like Edward Carpenter and members of
the Gemeinschaft Der Eigene to write about the love of comrades in openly erotic terms.
|
|
Photo Credits: The photo
appears courtesy of the
Archiv und Bibliothek des Schwulen Museums. Berlin. The photo
originally appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld's 1930 Geschlechtskunde auf
Gunddreissing jährur Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeit.
© 1998
Andrew Wikholm
All Rights Reserved
|