84
PARTISAN REVIEW
ostensibly heterosexual poems. Freed of the need
to
enslave the opposite sex,
the homosexual is free
to
see women as human beings, and thus we find in
Whitman a strong sense of compassion for suffering figures of women-the
mother, the prostitute, the spinster.
It
is not only that he does not see woman
as sex object, but that he can thereby see himself as self-enjoying. Whitman's
poetry is frequently auto-erotic in the sense that he takes his own body as a
source of sexual pleasure much as Freud's famous polymorphously perverse
child does, and derives pleasure from his own orgasm, rather than from any
sense of conquest or aggression .
Whitman makes no distinction between subject and object (a distinction
necessary
to
the position of woman as "other" and as property). All experi–
ence becomes a part of himself-" Absorbing all to myself and for this song"
(sec. 13)-as the total egotism of the child is restored . The' 'Song of Myself"
is the song of the world, as seer and seen, male and female become one . If
Whitman's vision is regressive, it looks back to an earlier ideal of play. We
need to see the sensitivity, the
finesse
ofWhitman, a sensitivity which has too
long been obscured by the image of him as
Walt Whitman, A Kosmos, ofManhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy , sensual, eating, drinking andbreeding
(Song ofMyself, sec. 24)
This was what Whitman wanted
to
seem
to
be;
but the poetry reveals the
happy truth that he was indeed a much deeper, more sensitive person than he
dared admit.
WHITMAN'S DREAM-VISION POETRY
The great debate over homosexuality in Whitman's poetry has generally
centered on the poems in the Calamus section or those poems which,
although not actually placed in that section, seemed to belong there, by
similarity of theme or imagery . But this emphasis is somewhat unfortunate for
two reasons. First it tends to isolate the' 'homosexual" poems of Whitman
into one neat category which can be labelled and then safely forgotten and put
away . Second it tends to assume that Whitman's sexuality is only relevant to
his most explicit and frequently didactic poems. On the (hopeful) assumption
that most readers are capable of reading Calamus themselves, I have therefore
preferred to center my discussion here on another mode ofWhitman's poetry,
which is perhaps slightly more elusive and
yet
which seems to me essential
to
an understanding of the whole body of his work. I refer to what I have called
Whitman 's dream-vision poems, those poems which are written in a state of
