ROBERT K. MARTIN
83
that Whitman changed or deleted have been restored. ' , But although the text
is restored, the editor feels obliged to insist on the interchangeability of the
sexes. He writes of the famous' 'Once I Pass' d Through a Populous City" text,
"What is intrinsic to the poem is not the sex of the loved one but the love
itself. "
Such intellectual softheadedness is characteristic of this reprehensible
edition which is only possible because of the critic's need to romanticize (i .e.
render abstract) a sexuality which he finds distasteful. One can hardly expect
much of anyone who can write such garbage as "Whitman was a prophet of
today 's sexual revolution ... In his love poems, youth speaks to youth of all
ages, across all centuries and languages ." But he goes on to ignore crucial and
obvious evidence, and refers to "the unnamed him or her whom Whitman
identified only by the number' 16' or '164 .'" The rankest amateur in
cryptography knows that Whitman meant P or PD, Peter Doyle.
The history of Whitman criticism in this connection is shameful. I can
think of no parallel example of the willful distortion of meaning and the
willful misreading of a poet in order to suit critics' own social or moral
prejudices . And it must be added that the very few critics who spoke against
this tradition of distortion were generally Europeans, who perhaps did not
totally share American Society's total and relentless hostility to the homo–
sexual. It is thanks to the work ofJean Catel , Roger Asselineau, and Frederik
Schyberg that Whitman finally can be seen as a poet of sexual love between
men . In the last few years there has been the important work done by Edwin
Haviland Miller, which has unfortunately not received the attention it
deserves (despite his overly normative Freudian bias) . One begins to suspect
that the history of Whitman misreading is not over.
Whitman 's own life was marked by the same pressures toward sexual
conformity that now lead to critical distortions . He seems to have felt the need
to
act out a role , to hide behind the mask of the tough . And he had to learn
the strategies of concealment, strategies that, until recently at least, all of us
had to learn in order
to
succeed as homosexuals in a heterosexual world. The
changing of texts , the excision of passages , these are but the most obvious of
what must have been an enormously painful series of acts performed almost
daily in order to conform to someone else's version of normality. And how
painful they must have been to the man who was able to give another man a
wedding band , who from his youth on wrote with passion only of friendship
between men , who cried out in suffering "0 unspeakable passionate love"
(Song of Myself, sec. 21) for the love, "the secret of my nights and days ,"
which lay hidden "in paths untrodden. "
One important consequence of his homosexuality is that Whitman,
unlike so many male poets , does not see women as sexual objects even in his
