Walt Whitman's Mystical Ethics of Comradeship: Homosexuality and the Marginality of Friendship at the Crossroads of Modernity

Contents

Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 CHAPTER ONE Literature as Religion: Whitman’s Messianic Enterprise 7 The Building of a Reputation 7 Theosophy, the Occult, and Whitman’s Apparitions 18 The Character of Whitman’s Religion 19 The Creed 29 CHAPTER TWO The Mystic Hypothesis 33 The Strong Hypothesis 35 The Weak Hypothesis 46 The Denial of the Hypothesis 49 Conclusion 51 CHAPTER THREE A Gospel of Beauty 57 The Classical Roots of Aestheticism 58 Whitman and the Platonic Tradition 61 From Phrenology to Aesthetic Morality 64 Whitman’s Treatment of the Ugly: The “Kosmic” Vision 68 Whitman and Nietzsche 71 Whitman and Oscar Wilde 80 viii Walt Whitman’s Mystical Ethics of Comradeship CHAPTER FOUR The Love of Comrades 83 A Messianic Mission 83 The Nature of Comradeship 87 Eduard Bertz: Comradeship as Veiled Homosexuality 92 Mystical Interpretations of Comradeship 95 Ethical Aspects of Comradeship 96 Religious Aspects of Comradeship 102 Social and Political Aspects of Comradeship 104 Whitman’s Comradeship and Symonds’s Concept of Greek Love 109 CHAPTER FIVE Whitman, the Moral Reformer 117 Poetry and Ethics: Whitman’s Moral Concern 117 The Character of Whitman’s New Morality 120 An Analysis of Whitman’s Morality: Briggs’s Theory 123 Whitman’s Attitudes to War 125 Robert K. Martin’s Theory: “Fucked by the Earth” 127 David Kuebrich’s Theory: Post-Christian Millennialism 130 Reynolds’s Theory: “Immoral Didacticism” 135 A Probable Synthesis: Nature, Science, and Evolutionary Theory 141 Conclusion 143 An Afterthought: Traubel, Homosexuality, and the Whitman Myth 151 A Queer (Theory) Postscript 155 A Queer (Theory) Twist: No New Species 156 Whitman’s Disappointment and the New Sexual Economy 157 Queer (Theory) Confusion and Its Uses 159 Abbreviations and Special References 161 Notes 163 Selected Bibliography 189 Index 199 ...