In this provocative analysis of Whitman's exemplary quest for happiness, Vivian Pollak skillfully explores the intimate relationships that contributed to his portrayal of masculinity in crisis. She maintains that in representing himself as a characteristic nineteenth-century American and in proposing to heal national ills, Whitman was trying to temper his own inner conflicts as well.

The poet's expansive vision of natural eroticism and of unfettered comradeship between democratic equals was, however, only part of the story. As Whitman waged a conscious campaign to challenge misogynistic and homophobic literary codes, he promoted a raceless, classless ideal of sexual democracy that theoretically equalized all varieties of desire and resisted none. Pollak suggests that this goal remains imperfectly achieved in his writings, which liberates some forbidden voices and silences others.

Integrating biography and criticism, Pollak employs a loosely chronological organization to describe the poet's multifaceted "faith in sex." Drawing on his early fiction, journalism, poetry, and self-reviews, as well as letters and notebook entries, she shows how in spite of his personal ambivalence about sustained erotic intimacy, Whitman came to imagine himself as "the phallic choice of America."

"The Erotic Whitman moves skillfully between Whitman's use of the sexualized body and his dreams for the body politic, drawing on Whitman's biography to provide newly informed, illuminating readings of his work. This work should place Pollak solidly alongside other elite Whitman scholars, such as Michael Moon, M. Jimmie Killingsworth, and Betsy Erkkila."—Emory Elliott, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Riverside

"This is an incisive, venturesome, carefully-argued contribution to an often-discussed but still insufficiently-understood dimension of Whitman's life, writing, and significance--its biographical-historical bases, its aesthetics, its cultural-political implications. One may at certain points dispute, but at no point fail to respect, Pollack's thoughtful unfolding of her subject from Whitman's early family life to the myth of democratic maternalism in his later poetry." (Lawrence Buell, author of The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture)

Read The Erotic Whitman by Vivian R. Pollak Online

Paperback: 290 pages
Author: Vivian R. Pollak
Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (August 7, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520221907
ISBN-13: 978-0520221901

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments  ix
Citation Note  xi
Preface  xiii
1.  The Erotics of Youth  1
   Family Faces  3
   Boarding at the Brentons  24
   A First Friendship  30
2.  Why Whitman Gave Up Fiction  37
3.  Interleaf: From Walter to Walt  56
4.  Faith in Sex: Leaves of Grass in 1855–56  81
   Twenty-Eight Young Men  82
   The Flesh and the Appetites  97
   The Twenty-Ninth Bather  114
5.  The Politics of Love in the 1860 Leaves of Grass  122
   Enfans d'Adam  129
   Calamus  136
6.  Whitman Unperturbed: The Civil War and After  153
7.  “In Loftiest Spheres”: Whitman's Visionary Feminism  172
Notes  195
Index  245

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vivian R. Pollak is Professor of English at Washington University, St. Louis, and is the editor of New Essays on James's Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw (1992) and A Poet's Parents: The Courtship Letters of Emily Norcross and Edward Dickinson (1988), and author of Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender (1984).

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