If anywhere in his poetry are we to find Whitman at his most frank about the experience of homosexual desire, it is in his Calamus sequence. In “In Paths Untrodden,” the poem which serves to open the sequence, we encounter Whitman celebrating “the need of comrades.” The exact nature of this comradeship resists clear and direct categorization. While many American poets and scholars have embraced Whitman at his queerest, others have pushed against or attempted to downplay those elements of the Calamus sequence by centralizing the notion of democratic comradeship over sexual desire.
The related but discrete concepts of homosociality and homoeroticism might serve to clarify what is going on in the poem “In Paths Untrodden.” In feminist theory, homosociality refers to the particular way in which males relate to one another on a non-sexual, platonic basis, and as a result solidify patriarchal social relations. This is distinct from homoeroticism, in which the sexual, desiring component is activated.
I argue that Calamus unites these spheres of male affection and embraces a comradeship of “athletic” (bodily, sexual) love, a love that is at once friendly and democratic and queer. And further, “In Paths Untrodden” prefigures some of the rhetoric of “coming out of the closet” which would later become a defining feature of the movement toward gay liberation, and marks a confessional announcement of the full embrace of the homoerotic alongside the homosocial.
Clear to me now standards not yet publish’d, clear to me that my soul,
That the soul of man I speak for rejoices in comrades,
Here by myself away from the clank of the world,
Tallying and talk’d to here by tongues aromatic,
No longer abash’d …
In these lines, we find Whitman rejoicing in a newfound clarity. It is the clarity of one no longer hiding, one “resolv’d to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment.” Yes, Whitman’s America is one of rugged, manly, egalitarian pride, but it is also unabashedly queer.
“In Paths Untrodden” certainly features the theme of both a brotherly, non-sexual comradeship juxtaposed with the concept of homosexual desire. And I agree with you that this poem denotes a certain “coming out of the closet” on Whitman’s part, especially his use of ambiguous terms such as “manly attachment” and “athletic love.” These terms can be construed various ways, but when I read the poem I definitely saw the clarity (as you put it) of Whitman’s desires.
I really like the argument here about the Calamus poems unity the homo-erotic and homosocial realms–something that many poets in his legacy (Crane, Ginsberg, Doty) explicitly affirm even as others (Spicer) deny it. More on that this week!