Calamus: a Brief Introduction
By Sam Magavern

Calamus is a sequence of 45 poems that Walt Whitman wrote in the late 1850s about camaraderie, friendship, and love among men. The Calamus poems first appeared in the third edition of Leaves of Grass, which Whitman published in 1860. In later editions of the book, Whitman kept most of the Calamus poems together, but he altered all of them – adding titles, removing lines, drastically re-punctuating, moving four poems into a different section of Leaves of Grass, and deleting three of the finest poems entirely. This website presents Calamus in its original 1860 version.

The late 1850s was a turbulent, dynamic time for Whitman. He was living in Brooklyn, sharing cramped quarters with his mother and several siblings. He worked for a year or so in 1858-1859 as the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Times, but during most of this period he was unemployed and strapped for cash. The first two editions of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855 and 1856, had won him some acclaim and notoriety, but they had sold relatively few copies. 

Whitman, who turned forty in 1859, spent much of his time strolling the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, riding on ferries and buses, and cultivating a wide range of acquaintances, including laborers, intellectuals, bohemians, and bus drivers. It was his feelings for these men – ranging from cheerful fraternity to earthy passion – that sparked the poems in Calamus (the calamus plant, also called sweet flag, is a tall, wetland reed with a notably phallic-looking spike of tightly clustered flowers).

Earlier in the 1850s, Whitman had more-or-less invented the modern, English-language, free-verse poem. Spurning rhyme and meter, Whitman drew inspiration for his new style from diverse sources such as newspapers, novels, lectures, street slang, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible. He did not want to write literature so much as prophecy: the foundation of a new religion that would acknowledge God and the immortality of the soul but dispense with clergy and churches; it would be contemporary, American, and democratic, and its first great example, or “representative man,” would be Walt Whitman.

As he labored on Calamus, Whitman confronted three challenges. The first was one of poetic craft.  He had already written magnificent long poems in free verse, including “Song of Myself” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Now he was experimenting to see if he could write short poems, too, in this new, more prose-like style. One of his solutions was to compose and arrange poems in a sequence, allowing them to echo, contradict, and build on each other, much as the different sections in “Song of Myself” had done. 

Whitman was grappling with more than technique, however. He was also questioning the role he had assumed as an American bard. Was he – with all his “dark patches,” unconventional lusts, and deceptive facades – really fit to proclaim and embody a new national religion? Even if he could play that part, did he want to – or would he rather retreat to a secluded pond (or a crowded Manhattan bar), alone or with a lover, and write poems not about America but about his own torments and joys? Should he, instead of broadcasting his poems to an entire nation, aim them at a more select circle of initiates?

Whitman was also probing the complexities of his – and his culture’s – feelings and attitudes about the relationships between men. Today, many Calamus poems seem clearly erotic. But in the late 1850s, things were very different. The word “homosexuality” did not exist, and homoeroticism, however prevalent, was taboo enough that many readers simply would not look for it. At the same time, ardent same-sex friendship was common, socially acceptable, and often expressed in passionate terms. As a result, it was Whitman’s heterosexual imagery, not his Calamus poems, that sparked controversy and calls for censorship, and only slowly, over time, did his same-sex eroticism come into plainer view.

Even harder for a modern reader to grasp is Whitman’s conviction that the key to saving American democracy was “intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man.” When he wrote Calamus, the United States was on the verge of the Civil War. Political parties, civic institutions, and religious traditions had not sufficed to hold the union together. Slavery was the most divisive issue, but Whitman also worried about how modernity, capitalism, individualism, and democracy itself could divide people. At the same time, new theories of human nature and experiments in Utopian living were sprouting up everywhere. Whitman was not alone in thinking that a different vision of love was both urgently needed and inevitable. 

What makes Calamus so complex is the way Whitman’s questions about democracy are intertwined with his questions about his role as America’s bard and his tumultuous feelings for other men. What makes Calamus so inviting is the way that he contradicts himself, “contains multitudes,” and demands that we, his readers, wrestle with him and his poems to co-create their meanings.