Whitman's Poetry of the Body

Sexuality, Politics, and the Text

M. Jimmie Killingsworth

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780807843147
  9780807818275
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469620633
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This book combines literary and historical analysis in a study of sexuality in Walt Whitman’s work. Informed by his “new historicist” understanding of the construction of literary texts, Jimmie Killingsworth examines the progression of Whitman’s poetry and prose by considering the textual history of Leaves of Grass and other works.

Killingsworth demonstrates that Whitman’s “poetry of the body” derives its radical power from the transformation of conventional attitudes toward sexuality, traditional poetics, and conservative politics. The sexual relation, with its promise of unity, love, equality, interpenetration, and productivity for partners, becomes a metaphor for all political and social relationships, including that of poet and reader. The effect of the poems is protopolitical, an altering of consciousness about the body’s relation to other bodies, a shifting of the categories of knowledge that foretells political action.

Killingsworth traces the interplay in Whitman’s poetry between sexual and textual themes that derive from Whitman’s political response to the historical turbulence of mid–century America. He describes a subtle shift in Whitman’s prose writings on poetics, which turn from a view of poetry in the early 1850s as morally and politically efficacious to a chastened romanticism in the postwar years that frees the poet from responsibility for the world outside his poems.

Later editions of Leaves of Grass are marked by the poet’s deliberate repression of erotic themes in favor of a depoliticized aestheticism that views art not as a motivator of political and moral action but as an artifact embodying the soul of the genius.

Index

• Adams, Henry, 67
• Adhesiveness, 112
• Adolescence, 5, 7, 10, 17–22, 28, 51–53, 83–87, 118, 123
• Allen, E. M., 144
• Allen, Gay Wilson, 86–87, 142, 176 (n. 6)
• Amativeness, 56, 112, 154
• American Phrenological Review, 56, 89
• “Are You the New Person Drawn toward Me?” 124–25, 149
• Aries, Phillipe, 29
• “As Adam Early in the Morning,” 114
• Aspiz, Harold, 69
• Asselineau, Roger, 144
• Autobiography of an Androgyne, The (“Earl Lind”), 108
• Autoeroticism. See Masturbation

• “Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads, A,” 145, 153–54
• Barthes, Roland, 82–83
• Beach, Calvin, 71
• Beauvoir, Simone de, 64
• Beaver, Harold, 53–54, 101
• Bedient, Calvin, 21, 48
• Berman, Harold, 127
• Bible, 121, 127–30
• Black, Stephen A., 41, 62, 132–33
• Blackstone, William, 99
• Blodgett, Harold W, 129
• Bloom, Harold, 37–38
• Bourgeoisie. See Middle class
• Bradbury, Ray, 2
• Bradley, Sculley, 129
• Brooklyn Daily Times, 33
• Bucke, Richard Maurice, 22, 165
• Bullough, Vern, 98
• “Bunch Poem.” See “Spontaneous Me”
• Burroughs, John, 106, 144
• “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” 56, 75–77, 81, 151–52
• Bychowski, Gustav, 36
• Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 98

• Cady, Joseph, 138, 175 (chap. 2, n. 1)
• “Calamus,” xviii, 54, 87, 96–130, 132–33, 135–43, 145, 147–50, 167–73
• “Calamus 1.” See “In Paths Untrodden”
• “Calamus 2.” See “Scented Herbage of My Breast”
• “Calamus 3.” See “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand”
• “Calamus 8.” See “Long I Thought That Knowledge Alone Would Suffice”
• “Calamus 9.” See “Hours Continuing Long”
• “Calamus 11.” See...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on the Text and the Abbreviations
• Introduction
• ONE Original Energy: 1855
• TWO Procreation and Perfectibility: 1856
• THREE The Tenderest Lover: 1860
• FOUR Silence: 1865–1876
• FIVE From Poetry to Prose: 1871–1891
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index