Katia’s CS for February 16

At the start of “Whitman and the Gay American Ethos”, Killingsworth mentions Whitman’s movement “away from claims of full disclosure (‘to go undisguised and naked’) toward a complex interplay of revealing and concealing a ‘secret’ at the center of identity” (123). In other words, one of the central tensions of the Calamus poems is the one between Whitman’s standard authorial position as a great revealer of intimate truths to his audience and the inherent secrecy of barely-developed gay identity in the mid-nineteenth century. 

These tensions can be traced within the text of the Calamus poems. Even as the sequence begins with an appeal to openness and celebration, “In Paths Untrodden” refers specifically to a secret, encoding the act of concealment into the fabric of these poems: “I proceed for all who are or have been young men, / To tell the secret of my nights and days, / To celebrate the need of comrades” (268).

Some Calamus poems go into the direction of the celebratorily historic – “Recorders Ages Hence” (275) addresses the historical memory surrounding Whitman’s existence, asking for the love between men that Calamus celebrates to be the central element around which he’s remembered, while “What Think You I Take My Pen In Hand” (284) values the same love above traditionally ‘epic’ poetic subjects incorporated into large-scale poetic history.

On the other hand, “Are You the New Person Drawn Towards Me?” (277) warns that “I am surely far different than you suppose.” “In Paths Untrodden”  (268), too, introduces to an element of danger or requisite secrecy to the information he offers the audience, with the parenthetical “(for in this secluded spot I can respond as I would not dare elsewhere)”.

With all of this in mind, characterize the relationship between openness and secrecy unfolding in the Calamus poems. How does tension between the secret and the visible, the spoken and the unspoken, function within the sequence or individual poems? How does this version of Whitman’s poetic voice, potentially changed or tempered by a certain need for secrecy, compare or contrast with how he’s presented his speaker-self in other poems we’ve read?