Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working Class Camerados

by Charley Shively (editor)

Book by

Genres: Biography, Classics

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Nelson Minar]

An important book, Shively did heroic work researching Walt Whitman's lovers and assembling collections of letters to and from them. He established Whitman's homosexuality without any room for doubt and cast a lot of light on the specific nature of his relationships with men.

Unfortunately the book is wrapped in some really unusual scholarship. The book is widely criticized for semi-fictional storytelling, inventing some color for stories about Whitman's various loves. They do make for better stories! And I appreciate Shively's gay liberation goal. But it's misleading, it's very hard to tell which things are true and which are not.

I'm also vexed by the last chapter, Shively's own editions of Whitman's gayest poems. What's strange is how he chopped up and reassembled some of the poet's own texts. For instance I spent a lot of time figuring out what was done to "City of Orgies". Shively's version takes the first line from an 1867 edit, then adds extra (clumsy) lines from an unpublished 1850s manuscript. What ends up in this book is not any version Whitman ever published together, but rather Shively's construction. He does disclose how he is going to do this kind of editing, and he does have some restraint. Still it seems inappropriate to me. Whitman does not need posthumous editing.

[Stephen]

Loved it... the 19th century never seemed so hot, but it's seriously tenderly attractive and unending, all a century's omnibus hook-ups compressed together.

Read Lorca's ode to Walt Whitman;

"Not for a moment, Adam of blood, Macho,
man alone at sea, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
because... ()...
The Faggots, Walt Whitman, point you out"