SOURCE: Shurr, William H. “Leaves of Grass as a Sexual Manifesto: A Reader-Response Approach.” In Approaches to Teaching Whitman's Leaves of Grass, edited by Donald D. Kummings, pp. 99-104. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990.

[In the following essay, Shurr demonstrates that Whitman uses his own presence in his texts to demand a specific response from his readers.]

Literary criticism is rightly concerned with the question of where the author places himself or herself in the text. How does the author choose to relate to the reader, with the text as surrogate? Theoretically it is impossible to read a text without coming to some implicit decision about this relationship. With Whitman, the college student will find no doubt.

Whitman clarifies his intended relationship to us at many points in his poetry, telling exactly how we should read him. His approach is consciously and blatantly seductive. He presents his book as his physical person and his purpose as a sexual relationship with the reader. As students notice this, they become personally involved with the poet. For many the relationship is disquieting, as Whitman predicted it would be.

One of the Calamus poems of 1860 is addressed to “Whoever you are holding me now in hand” (LG 115). The nonresisting reader experiences a moment of shock in realizing that he or she is now holding this book as if it were a human being held in the lap. The poem immediately charges any reader who cannot yield physically to Whitman the seductive writer to “let go your hand from my shoulders” (LG 116). The reader who does give in to Whitman's solicitation is invited to accept the reward of kissing the book with an erotic kiss, not some reverential kiss such as one might give to the Bible. It is “the comrade's long-dwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss.” The sympathetic reader is then charged, now that the book has been accepted as a real person and an erotic partner, with “thrusting me beneath your clothing, / Where I may feel the throbs of your heart …” (LG 116).

Whitman perfected the technique of reader seduction long before Roland Barthes wrote the theoretical text on it (Pleasure). Whitman did not invent erotic literature, but he did invent the text that is itself erotic and self-consciously seductive. The last line of the last Calamus poem reads “Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you)”—reminding the reader who has gone this far that he has agreed to take the book along as a permanent erotic partner.

This seduction of the reader is no small or partial aspect of the poems, no momentary mood. It appears throughout his work. The famous “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is another important poem in Whitman's campaign to seduce his reader. Students who have been given these hints on reading Whitman are usually eager to read through the poem carefully to identify the seductive passages. In this poem, Whitman once more presents his book as a physical body before the reader: “Closer yet I approach you,” he announces as the poem begins to mount to its climax, “Who knows but I am enjoying this? / Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?” Whitman as author lurks in the shadows of his text, yearning for the moment of sexual contact. This authorial presence, at once physical and invisible, urges upon the reader a relationship that is undeniably sexual union: he insists at the climax of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” that it is a relation “which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you” (LG 163-64).

Once they understand the technique of reader seduction, students will see that it served Whitman well in later collections, such as Drum-Taps, where Whitman imagines himself and his reader as individuated drops from the great ocean of life, momentarily separated but destined again to merge into indissoluble unity. These poems are written, he tells the reader, “for your dear sake my love” (LG 107). The living writer presents himself disguised as the book the future reader is holding: “(As I glance upward out of this page studying you, dear friend, whoever you are)” (LG 322).

Whitman is explicitly aware that many regard the sexual activity he proposes to the reader as evil: depending on the context it is either unconventional, immoral, or illegal. The most dangerous of all of his poems begins “As I lay with my head in your lap comerado.” In this seductive situation he warns:

The confession I made I resume, what I said to you and the open air
          I resume,
.....I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death,
For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws, to unsettle them,
.....And the threat of what is call'd hell is little or nothing to me,
And the lure of what is call'd heaven is little or nothing to me. …

(LG 322)

Whitman is a disturbing and demanding presence in his literature. He confronts the student with all the dangers of illicit sexual encounter and all the potential ecstasy as well. Students who grasp what kind of sexual activity Whitman is proposing may debate whether it is necessarily homosexual. Constant reference to the texts is the only method of finding evidence here. Following reader-relationship clues through whatever group of texts is chosen will always involve the students more personally in studying Whitman.

Whitman's sexual relationship with his reader received special emphasis in the middle editions of Leaves of Grass. Advanced students might be interested in studying one of the six editions (selected almost at random) to track the specific addresses to the reader (Whitman's seductive suggestions vary interestingly from edition to edition). The following poignant six lines were placed in a dramatic position, at the end of both the 1860 and 1867 editions:

Now lift me close to your face while I whisper,
What you are holding is in reality no book, nor part of a book;
It is a man, flush'd and full-blooded—It is I—So Long!
—We must separate awhile—Here! take from my lips this kiss;
Whoever you are, I give it especially to you;
So long!—And I hope we shall meet again.

(LG 604)

This is reluctant parting of lovers, at the conclusion of what must surely be America's most personal book.

The sentiment of this poem must have met with Whitman's approval, with his sense of how the collection should end, since he incorporated a powerful version of the same seduction at the very end of all later editions of Leaves of Grass, in the poem called “So Long!” Here the poet finally drops his book disguise:

Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man,
(Is it night? are we here together alone?)
It is I you hold and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms—

(LG 505)

In this poem Whitman seems to depend on the reader to guide him through the complete sexual act. The author now becomes the passive partner and the reader is expected to take the active part in their lovemaking. He continues:

O how your fingers drowse me,
Your breath falls around me like dew, your pulse lulls the tympans of my ears,
I feel immerged from head to foot,
Delicious, enough.

Then, as a passive, manipulated lover who rises toward climax and satiation, he continues:

Enough O deed impromptu and secret,
Enough O gliding present—enough O summ'd-up past.

The parting must then finally come; but it is the parting, Whitman insists, of lovers who have shared a sexual experience:

Dear friend whoever you are take this kiss,
I give it especially to you, do not forget me. …

(LG 505-06)

Quite likely, no college student has had to cope with this kind of authorial demand before, with so intense an involvement with a writer. Some readers have even seen the famous catalogs as seductive, as if Whitman were casting the widest net possible to catch every reader in one or other of his categories. He will let no one escape his seductive lure.

Whitman's seduction of the reader is no minor adjunct to his poetic work. It is thoroughly appropriate and even essential in view of his major theme. In the first poem of the earliest edition of Leaves of Grass, he solicited the attention of the serious reader, whom he addressed as the one who is “so proud to get at the meaning of poems.” In fact, he proclaimed that he would reveal to this careful reader something of the greatest value: “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.” Whitman went on to specify what he thought this origin might be: “Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world.” Whitman grew clearer and bolder the next year. In his second edition of Leaves of Grass, he repeated himself: “Always the procreant urge of the world” and then added the phrase “always sex” (LG 30-31).

The proclamation—that the sexual urge is the origin of poetry—stands like a great arch at the beginning of Leaves of Grass, orienting us toward a proper understanding of its content. This is the gateway through which can be seen the main thematic materials of the whole collection, its profound and pervasive sexuality. Students can explore the possibilities latent in this suggestion that the sexual drive is the same as the drive to create artistic works. The picture is complicated by Freudian suggestions concerning the narcissistic temperament that seem relevant to Whitman's first great artistic and ecstatic experience in section 5 of “Song of Myself.” This intense inaugural vision of the poet may be homosexual, heterosexual, or a narcissistic fantasy of sexual self-fulfillment. (Freud's thoughts, recorded mainly in his essay “On Narcissism,” seem relevant to Whitman's personality.)

This proclamation of both the sexual origin of his poetry and its sexual subject matter stands unchanged through all the many printings of “Song of Myself.” Students can easily enumerate the number and variety of sexual experiences Whitman goes on to describe, even in his first edition. Whitman, in fact, fills his first edition of Leaves of Grass with descriptions of many sexual experiences never before described in public writings.

The poem that would become “Song of Myself” begins with the famous scene of vaguely symbolized oral sex and rises to a first crisis that sounds like something similar to gang rape, when a group of frolicking young men suddenly become mean and dangerous as they turn all of their sexual play on one of their group. This is also the poem in which Whitman acts out a role as the female voyeur, watching the twenty-eight bathers and then imagining herself, unseen, swimming and playing intimately with them (sec. 11). Still later in the first edition of the poem, contact even with the earth is an extreme sexual experience: “Prodigal! you have given me love! … therefore I to you give love! / O unspeakable passionate love!” (Cowley 45). Then some lines later: “Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs, / Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven” (Cowley 50). Even the experience of listening to a soprano is intensely erotic. “She convulses me like the climax of my love-gripe” (Cowley 52).

The next poem in Leaves of Grass—one that would come to be called “The Sleepers”—describes not only the sexual manipulation of sleeping persons but solitary masturbation and an assignation with a lover on the beach as well.

The first-edition poem that would later be called “I Sing the Body Electric” and that would become the most important poem in the Children of Adam collection deliberately eroticizes the human body, featuring the sexually arousing details first of the male and then the female body. This is no merely aesthetic exercise; the description ends with “loveflesh swelling and deliciously aching, / Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous … quivering jelly of love … white blow and delirious juice, / Bridegroom-night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn …” (Cowley 119). In this poem Whitman imagines himself sharing the mother's breast with her infant, as he continues to explore a broad range of sexual experiences. Watching a parade of firemen he focuses on what he calls “the play of the masculine muscle through the cleansetting trowsers and waistbands” (Cowley 117).

Even his own sexual origins are described and celebrated in the poem that would become “There Was a Child Went Forth”: he records his father, “he that had propelled the fatherstuff at night, and fathered him … and she that conceived him in her womb and birthed him …” (Cowley 138-39; Whitman's ellipses).

For Whitman the newly discovered area of sexual experience is both the cause of his new poetry and the subject that is described and celebrated in this first edition. He can be forgiven the enthusiastic reports of an explorer and discoverer.

Most of Whitman's critics and biographers have been extraordinarily shy about the revolutionary sexuality explored in his work. There is something overly sanitized and genteel in the academic handling of Whitman, which has left this central force of his writing untouched. Critics and biographers have preferred to write about Whitman's debts to opera or phrenology and his supposed illegitimate children; they have discussed Whitman and Emerson or other figures, his style, his politics, or his catalogs—thus missing the central point he labored a lifetime to express. Academic critics have bent Whitman's poetry away from his intent, have finally trivialized a great writer by refusing to read the main message of his manifesto. They do not begin to describe the powerful energies set up in his poetry.

Students can discover and appreciate one of Whitman's main accomplishments through close reading and discussion of his poetry. They can readily perceive striking and wonderful new images for experiences that had rarely been approached before, at least in literary America. The poem “From Pentup Aching Rivers,” for example, yields fresh images, new fantasies, and emotive words for experiences that had not yet been described. Students can discuss to what extent Whitman's work is a sexual manifesto paralleling the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels in the previous decade. Sexual experience is the armature on which Whitman wound the long strings of his words. The poet who sang the body electric would approve of the electrical figure.

This class presentation and discussion of Whitman, then, stresses three points: Whitman declared the origin of poetry to be the sexual drive; his subject matter is primarily the exploration and definition of a variety of sexual experiences; and finally, his method of relating to the reader throughout the canon of his literature is chiefly by sexual seduction, achieved by placing himself within the text as an erotic partner for the reader. His work comes to us as a manifesto (in an age of manifestos) of sexual description and exploration. Whitman can overwhelm the student with a richly complex but unified and forceful experience.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill, 1975.

Blodgett, Harold W., and Sculley Bradley, eds. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. New York: New York UP, 1965. (Abbrev. LG.)

Cowley, Malcolm, ed. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition. New York: Viking, 1959.