ROBERT K. MARTIN
81
WHITMAN'S (MIS)READERS
Whatever homosexual readers may have thought (and John Addington
Symonds was but the fust to have recognized Whitman 's homosexual mean–
ings ; he has been echoed by gay writers from Andre Gide to Allen Ginsberg to
any ofa large number of young American poets all of whom take Whitman as
a point of reference, exceeded by no other American gay poet with the
possible exception ofHart Crane), Whitman's readers in general have made a
sorry record of misreading Whitman's poems. If one is charitable, one can
suggest that these readers were simply unable to see the homosexual mean–
ings, which were so divorced from their own experiences. But I am not
inclined to be charitable . The record of absolute lies and half-truths and dis–
tortions is so shameful as to amount to a deliberate attempt to alter reality to
suit a particular view of normality. IfWhitman is to be a great poet, then he
must be straight . If the poetry shows something else, Whitman must be made
to alter his own poetry, censor himself. Despite considerable concessions
made by Whitman during the course of his career, and the removal of a
number ofpassages, the rabid heterosexualists were not satisfied . Whitman 's
life must be betrayed , rewritten, and his poems reread in a " safe" manner.
Whitman must be saved from himself.
The process of this creation ofa new, false Whitman is so well known that
I will not spend too much time recounting its details . But it is important to
note the extent to which otherwise respectable and reliable critics went in their
efforts to "clean" Whitman up. The first stage, the most overt, was directed
toward biography, toward proving that Whitman was actively heterosexual in
his personal life . In part this stage was provoked by Symonds ' famous letter to
Whitman and Whitman 's equally famous (and comic) reply, in which he
boasted of having fathered six illegitimate children. Whitman had played the
role of good citizen , especially in his old age , despite the barely concealed
friendships with younger men (which are discussed in some detail by Edwin
Haviland Miller), and his older friends continued the fiction of his life . But
the first critics were not content with such an absence of open homosexuality :
theyneeded proofof heterosexuality . So the New Orleans story was invented ,
out of nothing but a desire to prove that Whitman was normal. And even
otherwise sensitive readers of Whitman, such as Emory Holloway, William
Carlos Williams , and Babette Deutsch , continued to believe in the story long
after its total fictitiousness had been demonstrated. Doubtless many still do.
The case of Holloway was particularly disappointing since it was he who
was responsible, in 1920 , for revealing that the poem which seemed to give
rise to the New Orleans story, "Once I Pass 'd Through a Populous City, " had
been changed prior to publication by Whitman to alter' 'I remember only the
man who wandered with me there for love of me ," to "I remember only
