SOURCE: “Death as Repression, Repression as Death: A Reading of Whitman's ‘Calamus Poems,’” in Walt Whitman of Mickle Street, edited by Geoffrey M. Sill, The University of Tennessee Press, 1994, pp. 179-93.

In the following essay originally published in 1989, Pollak suggests that in his “Calamus Poems,” Whitman uses “death tropes” to both deny and affirm his erotic fulfillment in the context of social and psychological oppression.

In a desperate and comical moment several years before his death in 1892, Whitman wrote to his English admirer John Addington Symonds that he had fathered six children; referred to a grandson, a “fine boy, who writes to me occasionally”; and generally sought to rebuff Symonds's persistent inquiries. Symonds had written:

In your conception of Comradeship, do you contemplate the possible intrusion of those semi-sexual emotions & actions which no doubt do occur between men? I do not ask, whether you approve of them, or...