Walt Whitman: Lover and Comrade

Walt Whitman's relations with his reader were both personal and didactic: he wished to invite comradeship and also to inculcate certain precepts. Revelation of hard-won personal insight and assertion of moral and metaphysical “truths” intersect to provide Whitman's poetry with its distinctive quality. It would therefore seriously distort Whitman to view his work solely as the product of either motive; however, it is useful to distinguish and to explore the psychological and programmatic impulses and their connections, if for no other reason than to clear the ground for an integrated reading of Leaves of Grass. The primary purpose of this paper is to organize the rich background material—for clarification of Whitman's relations with and attitudes toward real men and women. and as a kind of prologue to a study of the imaginative comradeship he established with the readers of his book.

Whitman idealized women as madonnas, pure and wise beyond the ken of men, but from earliest childhood he was terribly insecure in the presence of girls. George Whitman commented on Walt's youth: “… I am confident I never knew Walt to fall in love with young girls or even to show them marked attention. He did not seem to affect the girls.”1 Shyness toward women, originating partly in his feeling that social situations inevitably implied “sex,” precluded any lasting heterosexual relationship. Brought up among lower-class working people, Whitman was further inhibited by his ignorance of “polite” society, from which he was excluded until after he had achieved a type of fame. For these reasons he never “fit” into the mixed-company drawing-room,