Walt Whitman One Major Theme in Whitman Essay

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Walt Whitman

One major theme in Whitman is what he frankly refers to as "the love of comrades…the manly love of comrades." (Whitman, "A Song"). Although Walt Whitman is frequently but inaccurately claimed as a "gay" poet -- even though Leaves of Grass was published decades before the words "gay" or "homosexual" had entered the English lexicon -- it is clear that the role this plays in his writing is political. Whitman wrote in a country that was still a democratic experiment: "Song of Myself" predates the U.S. Civil War, which nearly caused the utter failure of that democratic experiment.

As we live in a historical moment when we can witness the struggles of democracy worldwide, it is particularly interesting to consider Whitman's emotional (and possibly even sexual) commitment to the idea of democracy. Maire Mullins notes that Whitman made great use of the contemporary pseudoscience of phrenology, the practice of generalizing about human character by reading the shape of the skull. (In 2013 phrenology has had a moment in pop culture, when Leonardo DiCaprio delivers a phrenological monologue in the Tarantino film "Django Unchained." ) But for Whitman, phrenology was used to describe an instinctive feeling towards democracy, which was almost sexualized.

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As Mullins writes, "Whitman borrowed from phrenology two terms, 'amativeness' to signal love between men and women, and 'adhesiveness' to signal deep friendship…Although some phrenologists had also used the term to refer to male/male friendship, this meaning would be more fully developed and advanced by Whitman" (Mullins 2009, p171).

In some sense, Whitman is using phrenology to describe a homoerotic bonding which he sees as essential to democracy: "adhesiveness" is what the poet, or any man, should feel for his "camerado." In some sense, Whitman is attempting to bridge the complex emotional currents between what a young male in 2013 means when he refers to someone as his "bro" and what the French revolutionaries meant in 1789 when they included 'fraternite" as a democratic ideal. Even though the sensuality and physicality of Whitman's imagination makes comradeship a profoundly erotic idea, the real point is centrality to the democratic experiment. "Adhesiveness" is the shared affection of man for man that is the foundation of democracy -- Whitman even relies on….....

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