American Literature and the Public Sphere

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Discussions of the public sphere in American literary scholarship commonly overemphasize the role that print plays in defining public discourse, neglecting the persistent importance of verbal arts such as oratory, and at the same time assuming a sharp divide between printed texts and oral performances. This opposition between printed works and oral forms has both practical and aesthetic consequences. Practically speaking, such approaches ignore the substantial overlap and integration of spoken and written or printed texts, while in aesthetic terms they ignore the considerable phonemic appeal that printed texts possess. The graphic element of print appeals to the visual and logical dimensions of language; printed works also frequently appeal to our pleasure in the aural qualities of language through incantation, rhyming, anti-logical rhythms, free verse, and rhetorical flights.¹ The phenomenology attributed to print shapes accounts of the public sphere and literature’s role within it.²

In “Whitman Drunk,” the essay that concludes his 2002 collection Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner identifies print as the dominant material and symbolic form shaping Whitman’s poetics and the emergent queer counterpublic sphere that Whitman influenced. At the end of the essay, Warner quotes passages from two poems that foreground the themes of physical presence and mediation in relation to print. “To a Stranger” describes how “You,” presumably the reader, “give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return, / I am not to speak to you” (Warner 286). These lines are important for Warner’s argument because they highlight the tension between physical intimacy and anonymity in Whitman’s poetry, which Warner relates to “the phenomenology of cruising” (287). He argues that “I am not to speak to you” both reflects the conditions of anonymous sexuality and refers to the poem’s printedness. A second passage, this time from “Song for Occupations,” makes Whitman’s preoccupation with the forms of print even clearer: “I was chilled with the cold types and cylinder and wet paper between us./I pass so poorly with paper and types . . . . I must pass with the contact of bodies and souls” (287). Warner concludes that in this passage, Whitman creates “jarring conventions of representation” that juxtapose the materials of print with the physical contact of bodies. Whitman pursues “cultivated perversity at the metadiscursive level,” Warner explains, in order to “make sex public” (288). He suggests that Whitman chose print as the medium for his poetry with the aim of forming a counterpublic of readers who might participate in a creative transformation of society by pursuing new modes of embodied expression. It is widely recognized that Whitman’s poetry played a prominent role in the formation of gay and queer identities. How important were his material and symbolic uses of print to that project?

To answer that question, we need to consider another set of images that runs through Whitman’s poetry and is arguably even more striking than the passages on print that Warner highlights. Voice is a central and complex trope in Whitman’s work, as it was for many of his literary contemporaries. Several passages from the 1855 version of “Song of Myself” illustrate the range of meanings that Whitman attached to voice. In an early moment, he urges his soul to “Loafe with me on the grass . . . . loose the stop from your throat,. . ./Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice” (ll. 75–77). Later he imagines stalks of grass as “so many uttering tongues!” (l. 110) and presents the bardic poet as the voice-giver: “Through me many long dumb voices, . . . . Through me forbidden voices,/Voices of sexes and lusts . . . . voices veiled, and I remove the veil,/Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured” (ll. 509, 519–21). Alternative sexualities are here described as voices requiring (im)mediation—unveiling, clarification, transfiguration. This core ambiguity—do these sexualities need to be revealed? or produced?—emerges in the poetry at points where linguistic modes of mediation...