“Ode to Walt Whitman” seems to be a sort of conversation the poet is having with himself. Lorca at once has affection for the boy trying on a wedding dress and rails against the “[f]aggots of the world, murderers of doves!” Federico Garcia Lorca was born in Spain in 1898, his country was predominantly Catholic and his countrymen knew what men were. Homosexuality was criminal before Spain and its God. When the poet writes about the faggots in cities, how they are full of “unclean thoughts,” this is a reflection of the education his nation gave him. He seems to love the quiet homosexual, the one who can “love other men and burn their lips in silence.” Being gay is fine but it cannot be part of the outside world. Whitman figures into this poem as another education, a voice guiding him in new directions. Lorca seems to hate cities, when he says that his world is “agony, agony” it is because “[b]odies decompose beneath city blocks.” New York is “mire and death.” The issue is the people, the inhabitants of these cities are treating gays as “flesh for the whip.” Lorca wishes for the “kingdom of grain” to save us from the “machinery and lament.” Whitman is interesting here because he is placed in New York, however, he is exempt from being part of it because he “sings the truths of wheat” and “wanted to be the river.” Whitman offers hope because he does not inhabit the bucolic land untrampled by the souls of a million boots – Whitman is within the beast yet he is beyond it because he knows the truth about the world. Lorca resents his world, he thinks it makes him something ugly so it is cruel. In the end, he resigns himself to waiting and hoping that there will come a day of reckoning. Lorca’s Whitman is a dreamer, perhaps oblivious to the machine surrounding him. Whitman dreams of lovely world that Lorca does not know. It is tragic because these things were not merely dreams to Whitman, I believe Whitman really knew and loved his world – he felt that his world was already sturdy and wonderful.
In terms of the homosexual aspects of this poem, I also found the section where Lorca is describing Whitman for the first time in the poem to be very interesting and full of explicit sexual language. He begins by calling Whitman a “lovely old man,” and then moves to describe his physical appearance where Whitman’s thighs become almost godly because they are “white as Apollos.” Even more explicit, I would argue, is Lorca’s auditory imagery where Whitman is described as literally moaning. I think that Lorca’s description of Whitman embodies both the poet’s forward thinking beliefs about homosexuality and his love of the physical body.
We talked quite a bit about this in class, especially noting how difficult it is to balance the level of venom he brings to a certain feminized gay identity while praising a more masculine / reserved gay sexuality. I still haven’t read a great account of how this balance works out in the end, or relates to Lorca’s own socio-historical context. It’s a poem that both embodies and eviscerates a certain kind of sexuality, and that, in the end, gives the poem–and the poem’s power–over to the disenfranchised. It’s a poem that seems at once revolutionary and reactionary, a poem in deep conflict with itself and with Whitman’s legacy.