Rhetorical Suspense, Sexuality, and Death in Whitman's "Calamus" Poems

JOHN VINCENT Rhetorical Suspense, Sexuality, and Death in Whitman's "Calamus" Poems cross the thirty-nine poem span of "Calamus," Whitman L.creates and sustains thematic and rhetorical suspensions. He manifestly dismisses the reader, as we will see in "Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand," reserves his affections for a particular reader, in "These I Singing in Spring" and "To a Western Boy," declares himself unreachable, in "Are You the New Person Drawn toward Me," or dares "not tell in words" the core of his motivation and emotion, in "Earth, My Likeness" (270-71, 272-73, 285, 277, 284). These are only several of the most obvious examples. Simultaneous with these forthright rejections of the reader, Whitman's poems declare that the reader is holding "him," not his book, in hand, and that for the right person he is wholly available. Similarly, he opines that the crucial ingredient which would make any man the proper recipient of his poems and affections "has always been waiting, latent in all men" (285). More locally, Whitman creates rhetorical suspensions with a structure of repeated negations followed by an initially positive but finally frustrated assertion, what I will call the "not . . . not . . . not . . . but" structure. Five of the sequence's poems are dominated by this structure, offering huge lists, each line headed by "Not . . ." or "Nor. . . ." Other poems use a less extended version of this structure as their closure, offering a single or double "not" and an ultimate "but." In each case, extended or brief, Whitman holds offmeaning, which implies an ultimate provision of meaning, and then proffers something of a different cateArizona Quarterly Volume 56, Number 1, Spring 2000 Copyright © 2000 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 30John Vincent gory in place of what was expected. This rhetorical bait-and-switch corresponds to the thematic oscillation between absolute availability and absolute unavailability, materiality and ghostliness, and between the proffering and withholding of "the truth" about the poet's sexual identity. In order to trace the development of these devices and themes across the span of the group, I begin by mapping the thematics of the sequence's first three poems, which declare the ambitions and scope of the cycle, move to the middle of the sequence and look more closely at the most vivid examples of the "not . . . not . . . not . . . but" structure, and then examine the closure that the last few poems offer the group. Closural effects happen at the level of the group ofpoems, that is, there are individual closures to each and every poem in the cycle, but also, the cycle itselfhas an arc: a development from beginning to end which entails and organizes the thematics and rhetorical moves of the individual poems. Issues of concealment and revelation of homosexual thematics are central to Whitman's "Calamus" poems. The first poem of the group "In Paths Untrodden" declares at its cymbal-crashing conclusion Whitman 's intention "To tell the secret of my nights and days, / To celebrate the need of comrades" (268). Throughout the sequence, what can and cannot, or will and will not, be revealed rivets the reader. It is difficult to read the cycle without wishing that through some adjustment one could be their true recipient, or conversely, without believing that perhaps , in fact, one is. With this dynamic in mind, some critics have set about locating a particular man to whom these poems were addressed or about whom these poems were written. Such approaches see the teasing moments of "Calamus" as the broken up pieces of a scholarly and historical puzzle rather than as primarilypoetic effects. Alan Helms, in his article on a sequence of twelve poems which Whitman t;tled "Live Oak with Moss," suggests that the "Live Oak" series is the "Calamus" group's less closeted origin ( 185-87).' Helms suggests not only that each group starts offhomo-affirmative and then gutters in the chill wind of homophobia, but also that Whitman, further capitulating to homophobic pressures, obfuscates the courage of "Live Oak"'s narrative in its metamorphosis into the "Calamus" series. The sequentiality ofthe "Live Oak" poems revealed, Helms argues, too much and had to be broken from its "fairly simple...