This thesis has been approved by

The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of English

______Dr. Robert J. DeMott Distinguished Professor, English Thesis Advisor

______Dr. Josephine Bloomfield Honors Tutorial College, Director of Studies English

______Dr. Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College

QUEERING THE LITERARY LANDSCAPE:

ALLEN GINSBERG AND WALT WHITMAN

______

A Thesis

Presented to

The Honors Tutorial College

Ohio University

______

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for Graduation

from the Honors Tutorial College

with the Degree of

Bachelor of Arts in English

______

by

Stephen P. Szendrey

June 2010

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE 7 A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words 7

CHAPTER TWO 23 Queer 23 “Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew 25 the doors themselves from their jambs!” “America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the 31 wheel”

CHAPTER THREE 36 “Resolv’d to sing no songs but those of manly 36 attachment” “Whole mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns 41 of cock, Grand Canyons of asshole” Conclusion 44

WORKS CITED 46

1

Introduction

I was 16 years old and a sophomore in high school when I had my first experience with Beat Generation literature. I had never heard of the Beat Generation, let alone Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg, but, on the recommendation of a few friends, I picked up On the Road and began reading. I flew through the book, and I was instantly hooked. I couldn't put it down. As soon as I finished the last page, I flipped right back to the first. Up to that point, I had never read anything that moved me the way my first, and second for that matter, reading of Kerouac did. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but there was something in his writing that kept me captivated. The book had the same effect on my friends. We were all ready to pack our bags, jump in the car, and head out to see America first hand. A few days later, our enthusiasm to have a Kerouacian journey may have died down, but my desire to read more of him grew unabated.

I began doing a little bit of research on my newfound literary love. I wanted to know all about the man whose writing so captivated me. After a bit of searching, I found a book at my school's library about the Beat Generation, and I ate it up. I had moved from having a Kerouac fever, to having an all-out Beat influenza. In my continuing quest to learn more about the Beats, I came across a photo of a man, Allen

Ginsberg, with whom I was unfamiliar at the time, sitting with Bob Dylan in front of

Jack Kerouac's grave in Lowell, Massachusetts. At this point, I was already a big 2

Bob Dylan fan, so discovering he hung out with the Beats piqued my interest in them all the more. Who was this little Jewish man sitting side by side with the legendary

Dylan? My desire to read anything by Kerouac quickly turned into a mission to delve into the works of Allen Ginsberg. After I bit of quick digging, I figured out what my first objective on the Allen Ginsberg mission should be: read Howl.

" I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

madness, starving hysterical naked" (Collected Poems 134)

I'll never forget my first experience reading those words. By the time I finished the poem, I felt like I had been through a hurricane. I didn't know what I had just read.

On the Road pulled me in and hooked me; Howl grabbed me by the balls. In terms of poetry, it was like nothing else I had been exposed to up to this point. It was indeed poetry, but there was no rhyme scheme, no meter; at least none that I could make out.

Instead, there were just long lines of free verse. Even though this poetry was completely foreign to me, I was fascinated by it because it represented a lifestyle and set of values radically different from that which I had been brought up in. So, just as with On the Road, as soon as I finished Howl, I started reading it over again.

I felt a sense of liberation just reading the poem. Not that I could necessarily personally relate to all of it, but I was drawn to the fact that Ginsberg was so willing to be open and raw on the page. It really affected me. I have never been one to be able to be completely open and honest about my thoughts or feelings or private beliefs.

And I am often frightened by people knowing the real true me that hides somewhere 3

within, and I think that's what drove me to really feel a connection with Ginsberg and his poetry. He was not afraid to expose himself and make himself vulnerable. As a young, white male, growing up in a middle-class, suburban Catholic family going to a

Catholic grade school and then an all-boys, Jesuit high school, I was really intrigued by the idea of someone living life as Ginsberg chose to, filled with same-sex lovers, eastern mysticism, and best of all, no normal 9-5 routine like most people in America.

He was free to spend his days following whatever pursuits interested him, especially writing poetry. He was not tied down to a desk as a part of corporate America playing a cog in the machine, which is all I saw in my future. He was not afraid to be himself and let that show through on the page, and that’s really what initially drew me to

Ginsberg’s work. When I wanted to escape my world, I would read Ginsberg and enter his.

Perhaps my biggest draw to Ginsberg was the fact that he was a part of the counterculture of his time. From a young age, people who had ideas and values that fell outside of the societal norm intrigued me. I think it all comes back to my conservative, Catholic upbringing. There were so many rules that didn’t make sense to me and that seemed so arbitrary. For instance, I didn’t understand why it was a hard and fast rule that I couldn’t eat meat on Fridays in Lent, or why I was taught that sex outside of marriage was such a horrible sin. Though I had these questions, I mostly kept them to myself because I was too afraid to be thought of as different.

Ginsberg’s poetry was a safe way for me to have access to the counterculture without having to become a part of it myself. I lived vicariously through Ginsberg, and 4

reading his poetry became my quiet, secretive backlash against society since I was too afraid to step outside the boundaries myself.

This interest in the Beats has continued with me throughout college. So, when it came time to write a paper on 19th century American literature, a time period that, I’ll admit, is not my favorite, I knew I had to do something interesting to keep myself motivated. That motivation came in the form of Allen Ginsberg. After reading Walt

Whitman's Leaves of Grass, I was struck by the similarities I noticed between him and

Ginsberg, including both writer's apparent treatment of homosexuality and their use of long, non-rhyming lines in their poetry. That paper, which looked very broadly at the two men and compared their literary works, became the catalyst for this thesis.

In his book, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, Robert K. Martin argues that "a sense of shared sexuality has led many gay writers to develop a particular tradition" (xv). He continues, "This tradition has been formed partly out of a need for communication (in which allusions can serve as code references) and partly out of a feeling of exclusion from the traditions of male heterosexual writing" (xv). It has been this "homosexual tradition" that has led many to the writings of Ginsberg and

Whitman. They serve as beacons of hope for those who may feel ostracized because of their sexuality or their beliefs. It is through the writings of Whitman and Ginsberg that many have come to find themselves, not necessarily just as homosexuals, but as men and women, and as Americans. Whitman and Ginsberg celebrate manly love, the sexual desire of one man for another, and the transcendent power they find in those very things. Because of this, they are able to do for many what Marge Piercy says the 5

two writers did for her, "each of them seemed to say to me by their practice, if you write out of who you are, if you deal genuinely with your own experiences, if you go into yourself honestly, you can write something worth reading" (98). And though I am not a homosexual male or a poet, these men and their fearlessness and their willingness to be who they are without apologizing have also inspired me. Since reading their poetry, I have been able to begin to open myself up more, and I have been able to start to work on my fear of exposing the inner me to others.

By breaking away from the constraints of a rhyme scheme or set meter,

Whitman and Ginsberg were able to produce poetry that was fresh and revolutionary.

But even as they pushed against normative boundaries and broke down walls in form, they also did so in content. Through Leaves of Grass, Whitman was able to establish a path for homosexual poets who came after him to follow. He set the bar for discussing homosexuality in poetry as he shared with the reader his feelings of manly love right there in the text. In the mid 20th century, Allen Ginsberg picked up the homosexual tradition that Whitman began in the mid 19th century. Where Whitman quietly whispered about his sexuality, alluding to it but never overtly stating it, Ginsberg shouted about his sexuality, making sure all who came into contact with his works would learn about the joy to be found in the male-male bond. By refusing to be pigeonholed into the same classical forms and content of poetry that had been used widely by their contemporaries, these two revolutionary poets were each able to do something new and fresh with their writing. Both Whitman and Ginsberg wrote from a place of true authenticity and identity, and that is something to be admired. I would 6

argue that first Walt Whitman, and then Allen Ginsberg, following in the poetic tradition established by his predecessor 100 years earlier, were able to “queer” the literary landscape of their respective time periods with both the form and content of their poetry, and thus, they effectively helped shape the future of the tradition for forthcoming homosexual American poets as something new and different from the classical poetic forms. 7

Chapter I

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Though Whitman's awareness and celebration of his homosexuality is present and plays an integral part in his poetry, it is not usually as clear-cut as Ginsberg's and often needs to be extrapolated from the text. For "not until Allen Ginsberg's Howl and

Other Poems (1955) would we have an unabashedly homosexual confession in poetry"

(Cherkovski vxii). This may well be because, up until the time of Ginsberg, American male poets did not feel safe declaring and rejoicing in his homosexuality for fear of repercussions from the predominantly heterosexual world around him. Though Leaves of Grass is not as blatantly homosexual as Ginsberg's Howl or “Please Master,”

Whitman's desire for a homosexual relationship, or "manly friendship" or

"adhesiveness" as he calls it, can easily be read throughout the text. However, inferences of Whitman's sexuality come not just through the text of Leaves of Grass; they can also be read in a number of photographs taken of Whitman with young male friends, which have been dubbed, at least by Ed Folsom, as "Whitman's Calamus

Photographs" in an essay he wrote with the same name. These photographs express in a photographic image what Whitman often expressed in his poetry regarding his feelings towards other men. The Calamus photographs were held to be very revealing, 8

to the point that they weren't even published during Whitman's lifetime. It was not until after his death that they began to be published, but even then his close disciples and friends tried to control their dissemination in an attempt to avoid public discussion of Whitman's sexuality.

According to Ed Folsom, "the first sustained public discussion of Whitman's

'Calamus' emotions as suggestive of a physical love of man for man" (201) was found in John Addington Symonds’s 1893 book entitled, Walt Whitman: A Study. Symonds also included in his book the photograph of Whitman and Warren Fritzinger

(“Warry”) on the Camden wharf taken in 1890 by John Johnston (Fig. 1.1). John

Addington Symonds, who was another 19th century homosexual male, wrote to

Johnston requesting the photograph of Whitman with Fritzinger on the Camden wharf as soon as he learned of it. In the letter he made reference to the fact that he might have a unique insight into the meaning of the photograph, saying, "I am trained to see, an artist of any kind sees more than the uninitiated can" (Folsom 204). Symonds appears to be referencing the fact that he himself was a homosexual, and, as a result, he was able to read into the image in a way an "uninitiated," or heterosexual male might not be able to. By reading Ed Folsom’s scholarship on the subject and subsequently studying the photographs, I have attempted to adopt an “initiated” method of studying and discussing the photos I have used in this work. This

“initiated” reading might very well reveal a relationship deeper than friendship between the two men manifesting itself in the image. 9

Another of the Calamus photos is one of Whitman with Bill Duckett (Fig. 1.2).

It was first released in 1896 in Thomas Donaldson’s book Walt Whitman, the Man.

“Donaldson captioned the photo ‘Mr. Whitman in his buggy—Bill Duckett, his boy friend, with him. Camden. October 1886’” (Folsom 204). Folsom also points out,

“The ambiguity of the term ‘boy friend,’ signaling at once a friend who was but a boy and an intimate male partner, is simply allowed to stand with no gloss” (204). The caption could merely mean that Duckett was a boy who was a friend of Walt

Whitman, but the use of the word “his” and not “a” adds the element of Whitman’s possession of Duckett. This would lead one to believe that maybe there could be something more to the caption, that it could be referencing the fact that Duckett was a lover of Whitman’s. Since Whitman never openly admitted to a relationship with any specific man, we may never know, but not knowing exactly is why Folsom and I speculate.

The Calamus photographs I found most interesting, though, are two of Whitman with Peter Doyle. The first of the two (Fig. 1.3) was published as the frontispiece for

Maurice Bucke’s 1897 book, Calamus. This book was a collection of letters Whitman had written to Doyle (Folsom 205). In the picture, Whitman is seated with Peter

Doyle standing next to him with his hand on Whitman’s shoulder. It’s almost a traditional wedding pose, with the bride, Whitman, seated with the groom’s, Peter

Doyle’s, hand on his shoulder. This is not the only role he is confined to in this photo, though. As Ed Folsom notes, “Whitman’s subject position is unstable enough here to allow him spatially to occupy the position of bride but temporally (given his 10

age and stature) to play the groom’s role, too” (205). Whitman is able to assume the role of the bride, not by cross-dressing, but by cross-posing (Folsom 205). In assuming both male and female roles in the same photograph, Whitman is able to keep himself from being tied down to one position. By cross-posing in a traditional wedding pose, Whitman allows himself to take up roles as both giver and receiver as a lover. It is in these subtleties that Whitman is able to clandestinely reveal his homosexual nature to those with an eye to read it in the photograph.

The second Whitman-Doyle photograph (Fig. 1.4) did not appear until 1905, in

Eduard Bertz’s Walt Whitman: Ein Charakterbild. According to Ed Folsom “the

German work…inflamed the controversy about Whitman’s sexuality; in it Bertz mounted an extended argument asserting that Whitman was homosexual, and offered the Whitman/Doyle photo as one prime piece of evidence” (205). As a result of this claim, this book was attacked in the United States, and thus has never been translated into English. In the photograph, Whitman and Doyle sit in adjacent chairs; Whitman’s arms are crossed along with his legs. Their bodies are slightly turned towards each other’s, and the two men appear to be gazing into each other’s eyes with something more than mere friendship in mind. There seems to be something in the gaze that

Whitman’s friends also noticed. Horace Traubel, a close friend of Whitman’s, once described the gaze between Whitman and Doyle in the photo as “sheepish” (Folsom

207). There was one interaction with Whitman regarding the picture Traubel recorded. Whitman asked him what it looked like he was conveying in the photo, to which Traubel responded, “Fondness, and Doyle should be a girl” (Folsom 208). 11

Whitman is said to have just shaken his head and laughed, but that revealing quality I see in Whitman’s gaze in the photo must hold some weight if a close personal friend of Whitman’s felt it was noticeable enough to comment on it. Ed Folsom even goes as far as saying that Whitman and Doyle “are lost in each other’s gaze” (209) in the photograph. They provide photographic images of the textual images Whitman creates when he writes, “I proceed for all who are or have been young men,/To tell the secret my nights and days,/To celebrate the need of comrades” (Leaves of Grass 98). These lines lead one to the same conclusion the photographs do: Walt Whitman celebrated the idea of love, physically and spiritually, between two men.

In her book, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire,

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick states,

Photographs of Whitman, gifts of Whitman’s books, specimens of his handwriting, news of Whitman, admiring references to “Whitman” which seem to have functioned as badges of homosexual recognition, were the currency of a new community that saw itself as created in Whitman’s image. (206)

Sedwick’s statement comports with Robert K. Martin’s comments on the formation of the homosexual tradition in American poetry. It is this desire among homosexual men, and especially homosexual writers in particular, to have a “sense of a shared sexuality” that leads to reading Whitman’s poems and the Calamus photographs examined above as “badges of homosexual recognition.” This “new community” was the emerging homosexual tradition in American literature, but poetry especially. Ed

Folsom writes, “Richard Dellamora has extended this suggestions into an analysis of 12

what he calls ‘the Whitmanian signifier,’ discovering in the late nineteenth century a striking ‘use of his name as signifier of male-male desire during the period’” (206).

Knowing this, it can be said, then, that it is with Walt Whitman, with his writing (most notably Leaves of Grass, from which I will discuss selected poems later) and with his

Calamus photographs, that the homosexual tradition in American poetry begins. This tradition is a torch that has lasted over 100 years, and has been taken up by many

American poets along the way. One such torchbearer, and, I would argue, the foremost torchbearer in the twentieth century, was Allen Ginsberg.

Many who have read Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and have at least a vague understanding of his biography have noticed some striking similarities between the lives of Ginsberg and Whitman, and between Ginsberg’s poetry and Whitman’s poetry. In his book, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life, Gary Schmidgall goes as far as to say,

“[Ginsberg] was not so much Whitman’s unparalleled twentieth-century heir as he was his reincarnation” (xxxv). While it may be a little overzealous to call Ginsberg

Whitman’s “reincarnation,” the ties between the two writers are in fact strong. With poems like Howl and “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg displayed his indebtedness to Whitman for establishing the homosexual tradition in American poetry that Ginsberg himself came to be a part of and eventually also helped shape.

Ginsberg, much like Whitman, revealed his desire of manly love via images, both photographic and textual. I would like to focus on two photographs of Ginsberg taken with longtime lover Peter Orlovsky (both of which I find to give great insight into

Ginsberg and his personal take on homosexuality) before delving in to a textual 13

examination of how Whitman and Ginsberg were both queering the literary landscapes of their respective time periods.

Unlike Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, at least in adulthood, was very public and forthcoming about his same sex lovers. He was very open and willing to talk about who he had or had not had a relationship with, whether it be platonic, strictly sexual, or sexual and romantic, and did so on numerous occasions. To name a few,

Ginsberg listed Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady as intermittent lovers. Then, there is also Peter Orlovsky, with whom Ginsberg had a long-running relationship that was about more than just sex. This willingness to talk frankly of homosexual relationships and sexuality was something that came from a man who was comfortable being who he was as a homosexual male, regardless of the heteronormativity seemingly pushed on him by society. Being able to speak so candidly on the subject of manly love without a fear of persecution was a perk that was granted to Ginsberg and not Whitman merely by chance of Ginsberg living in a later, somewhat more sexually tolerant time period.

In 1963, the world-renowned photographer Richard Avedon took what I’m assuming was a series of photographs of Ginsberg and Orlovsky together. Out of that supposed series came two photographs I find relevant to my study. The first photograph (Fig. 1.5) can be examined in much the same way the first Whitman photograph was examined. It features Ginsberg and Orlovsky standing side by side in a seemingly traditional wedding pose. Ginsberg, as bride, is standing beside

Orlovsky, as groom, with his arms draped around Orlovsky in an embrace, while Peter 14

Orlovsky’s arm hangs around Ginsberg’s shoulders. To add to it, both men are completely nude, and the photo, taken from the mid-thigh up, shows pubic hair and even most of Peter Orlovsky’s penis. This nude embrace brings a much more physical and overtly homosexual feel to the photograph, where Whitman’s photos were more removed physically and more covertly homosexual. As was stated previously,

Whitman cross-posed as bride spatially, but groom temporally in his “wedding photograph” with Peter Doyle. Ginsberg does the same thing with his “wedding photograph” with Peter Orlovsky. He appears as the bride spatially in the photograph, and as the groom temporally. Though he is only six or so years older than Orlovsky,

Ginsberg’s receding hairline adds to his perceived age in the image, and gives him a much older look than thick-haired Orlovsky. Once again, if extended, this assumption of the roles of both bride and groom in the photograph allows Ginsberg to assume roles of both giver and receiver as a lover. It also provides Ginsberg a chance to visually break down the walls put up around homosexual love by a heteronormative society by portraying two nude men in a loving, gentle embrace. The photo does just that by showing a softer side to homosexual love, one outside of and in contrast to the more hardcore image of anal sex that is often first thought of when bringing up male- male sexuality.

Ginsberg is very bold when it comes to declarations of sexuality. This second photograph by Richard Avedon (Fig. 1.6) shows an even more daring side of

Ginsberg, as it is a close up of Ginsberg and Orlovsky with eyes closed, tongues out and touching, as Ginsberg wraps his arm around the younger Orlovsky. Ginsberg 15

often uses brazen or crass lyrical imagery when discussing physical love between two men in his poetry. It is an attempt to shock his audience into seeing that there can be joy in the union of two men, and Ginsberg wants to celebrate it by sharing it with everyone. With this photograph, he is taking the same approach. Seeing two men

French kiss, if you will, is not a sight many are used to seeing, especially in the 1960s.

By taking this picture, Ginsberg is rebelling against the restrictions of a seemingly homophobic society. It is one thing to write about manly love, it is another thing to be photographed kissing a man, essentially putting a permanent, photographic image of manly love out there for the world to see. In this picture, Ginsberg holds nothing back; he is presumably nude, engaged in a sensual kiss with his lover. He bares his body and shares his physical love in order to show the world the beauty that he finds in the special bond between two men.

With these photographs, Ginsberg follows Whitman’s lead, and brings a visual component that can accompany his poetry. Both men transferred their feelings of manly love, normally celebrated through their poetry, into images that stick with the viewer. By studying these photographs, we can see how each man’s love for other men did not stop at the written word. Both Whitman and Ginsberg lived lives that reflected their written texts, and, with a careful examination, one is able to see how

Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg were able to bring the bound-breaking attitudes and beliefs on manly love they exhibited in their poetry to a series of photographs that, when read properly, can be used as visual supplements to the texts. 16

I wanted to start by looking at these photographs because I feel they are a good means of easing into an examination of the radical aspects of these men and their poetry. Within these few images, the essence of Whitman and Ginsberg’s groundbreaking nature is revealed if you know how to look, and so it becomes a good way to introduce what I learned only after reading countless lines of poetry. To get an idea of what was so innovative about Whitman and Ginsberg, one needs to read more than just a few lines of text. The images are a way to encapsulate all the revolutionary aspects of the men into a few simple photographs, and serves as a good jumping off point for diving more deeply into their poetry.

17

Fig. 1.1 18

Fig. 1.2

19

Fig. 1.3 20

Fig. 1.4 21

Fig. 1.5 22

Fig. 1.6 23

Chapter II

Queer

In my introduction, I stated that Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg were both able to “queer” the literary landscapes of their respective times in terms of form and content. Before exploring how each man did this, I want to discuss what exactly I mean by using the term “queering.”

In her article, “Queer,” Siobhan B. Somerville looks at the history of the word

“queer” and queer activism. The exact etymology of the word “queer” is unknown.

Somerville gives the reader a few potential sources, but notes that they have all been contested (187). She says, “From [1700] until the mid-twentieth century, ‘queer’ tended to refer to anything ‘strange,’ ‘odd,’ or ‘peculiar,’ with additional negative connotations that suggested something ‘bad,’ ‘worthless,’ or even ‘counterfeit’” (188).

Around the first few decades of the twentieth century “queer” became linked with ideas of sexual practice and sexual identity, “[b]ut it was not until the 1940s that

‘queer’ began to be used in mainstream U.S. culture primarily to refer to ‘sexual perverts’ or ‘homosexuals,’ most often in a pejorative, stigmatizing way” (Somerville

188). So, it is a fairly recent idea to refer to a homosexual in terms of the word

“queer.” 24

Today, there is a vast difference “between a lesbian/gay rights approach and a queer activist strategy” (Somerville 189). This difference can be clearly seen in

Somerville’s examining of each group’s approach to the same-sex marriage debate.

She argues that the lesbian/gay rights approach is to legitimize lesbian and gay people as a “viable ‘minority’ group” (189). With this minority group constructed, a lesbian/gay rights activist would then argue that those in lesbian and gay same-sex marriages should be given access to the same privileges afforded to those in straight marriages. They would “appeal to liberal rights of privacy and formal equality”

(Somerville 189). They would simply argue that same-sex and straight marriages be afforded the same rights and privileges.

On the other hand, “queer activists and theorists [would] question why marriage and the nuclear family should be sites of legal and social privilege in the first place” (Somerville 189). Further,

[b]ecause same-sex marriage would leave intact a structure that disadvantages those who either cannot or choose not to marry (regardless of their sexual orientation), a more ethical project, queer activists argue, would seek to detach material and social privileges from the institution of marriage altogether. (Somerville 189)

Where a lesbian/gay rights activists would seek to portray lesbians and gay men as a minority and try to gain rights that way, a queer rights activist would seek to abolish ideas of majority versus minority and break down barriers that separate certain people in society as “other” to the norm. They would seek to level the playing field, and refrain from noting something or someone as marginal or part of the minority because 25

of differences in sexual preference. So, when using the terms “queer” or “queering” I am referring to attempts to break down barriers and to attempts to refrain from classifying that which is new or different as something in the minority. Instead the goal is to make that which is different just as accepted as that which is “normal,” as different does not equate to less valuable.

Thus, for my purposes, “queer” becomes a trope to talk about the ways in which these two poets unsettled the literary landscapes of their times. While it hints at connotations of homosexuality, I use it to mean much more. I am appropriating the term less for its reflective sexual interests, and more as a way of thinking about each man’s larger poetic project, which was rewriting the poetic terrain of their respective time periods.

“Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”

Referring back to the analogy of the lesbian/gay rights approach to same-sex marriage versus the queer activist approach to same-sex marriage, I would argue that

Walt Whitman queered the poetic landscape of the mid-nineteenth century in terms of form with an approach much like that of a queer activist today. With his long-lined, strophic free verse in Leaves of Grass, Whitman was not attempting to make this new form of poetry an accepted minority. Instead, he showed that you didn’t have to 26

follow traditional poetics rules and norms to create emotionally moving, effective poetry.

Up until Whitman first published Leaves of Grass in 1855, the poetic tradition in America was largely tied to traditional English poetry. Most traditional English poetry consisted of fixed rhyme and meter patterns that left no room for originality in form. Poets took what they wanted to get across to the reader and crafted their diction to fit whatever type of poem they were writing, whether it be a sonnet or a villanelle, instead of freely choosing their diction and crafting a free-form, free verse poem.

“Whitman stripped poetry of sentimentality and took the focus from idyllic pastorals to sweeping, clamorous, non-rhyming poetry peppered with darkness” (Cherkovski xiv). Walt Whitman popularized free verse in America with the publishing of Leaves of Grass. He started a new tradition in American poetry of breaking bounds in form in order to break free from the limiting shackles of set meter and rhyme. This would be a tradition that Allen Ginsberg would follow later with Howl, which he first published in 1955. With Leaves of Grass, Whitman “rejected the tyranny of tradition and its metrics” (Knapp 10). He “struck down what he considered to be artificial forms and constraints imposed on his animalistic hunger for free expression” (Knapp 10).

However, free verse is not to be misunderstood as a mode of poetry in which no thought is given to the crafting of the poem. Though he did not stick to a set form,

Whitman did carefully craft his poetry. As Bettina Knapp points out,

[A]lthough liberal in form and thematics, Whitman’s poems were chiseled with the precision and deftness of the sculptor, and the sensitivity and mathematical accuracy of the musician….Discarding 27

verse or line when arbitrarily rigidified by predetermined metrical patterns and regulations, Whitman composed in units, clauses, and sentences, stressing not one vowel necessarily, but using ‘hovering accents’ that distributed emphasis on a word or grouping of words.” (10)

Though it does not have a set, consistent rhyme scheme, the poetry still maintains a rhythmic quality, especially when read aloud. Whitman was able to retain this bardic quality while striking out and using free verse for his poetry, even though it went against the standards for American poetry at the time.

With Leaves of Grass, Whitman sent ripples throughout the literary world, especially in America. As Neeli Cherkovski points out, “Whitman didn’t throw a pebble into the literary pond; he pushed a boulder over the cliff….He wanted to win over the country with a popular poetry born of the streets, feeling compelled to tackle the idea of literary exclusivity” (xiv). This attempt to “tackle the idea of literary exclusivity” stemmed from Whitman’s democratic vision for America, and his development of free verse poetry reflected this very same democratic vision. Bettina

Knapp argues that Whitman was “the poet of America and of democracy” (83). She continues, “Whitman was sympathetic and compassionate in his feelings toward human beings, whatever their class or inclinations. He believed in the brotherhood of people, in social justice, and in freedom” (83). By writing the poems of Leaves of

Grass in generally long-lined, free verse, Whitman set up a new style for the

American poet. “[Whitman] yearned for a national culture built from the ground up, not delivered downward from the universities or the government….His celebration of 28

the average man came from a deep-rooted conviction in the democratic way of life”

(Cherkovski xi). One way of building this national culture from the ground up was to make poetry accessible to all. Whitman broke down the traditional barriers of form to create a new, “American” mode of poetry in which rigid rules were no longer a factor.

This democratic view of American poetry can be seen in the Preface to the

1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. He writes:

The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them the bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other continents arrive as contributions…he gives them reception for their sake and his own sake. His spirit responds to the country’s spirit…he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes. (618)

Here he calls for the American poet to incorporate the national spirit in his poetry.

This new, American poetry integrates all of America, its people and its land, and uses them to create something original from the ground up. It breaks away from the forms of French or English poetry that came before it, becoming its own entity. Whitman continues, later saying, “The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into any thing that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe” (621). This is a truly democratic vision. Nothing is too small or frivolous for this new American poetry. Everything and everyone, no matter how inconsequential they seem, become important to defining Whitman’s poetic vision.

He also states, “He [the poet] is not one of the chorus….he does not stop for any regulation…he is the president of regulation” (621). This is reflected in Whitman’s 29

poetic innovations in form. He does not worry about the traditional rules of poetry; he instead decides for himself what poetry will be and how its form will be defined. By doing this, he throws out the need for the exclusive, alienating poetic forms of the past, and brings to life his democratic poetic vision in Leaves of Grass.

Not only did Whitman’s radical use free verse reflect his desire for a more democratic literary culture and overall American culture, it also reflected his backlash against prude treatment of sexuality. As Amitai Avi-Ram argues in his essay, “Free

Verse in Whitman and Ginsberg: The Body and the Simulacrum,”

it is by now very much a commonplace to associate [Whitman’s] free verse with the themes of freedom, democracy, and sexual liberation. By contrast, one tends to think of traditional English stress-syllabic meters as restrictive and to associate them with class inequalities and, to put it reductively, with Victorian prudery. (93)

Whitman sought to actively distance himself from these limiting forms and from the negative qualities he saw them standing for. He was ready for a new type of American poetry. He himself stated,

In my opinion the time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, &c., and that even if rhyme and those measurements continue to furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes, (especially for persiflage and the comic…) the truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough,) can never again, in the English language, be express’d in the arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion. (quoted in Avi-ram 98-99)

30

Whitman’s attempts to bring about a change in American poetic form were no accident. He set out with the mission to leave the traditional English forms behind and spark a new formal tradition for poetry in America. He needed a new mode of poetry that could express his ideas of sexual liberation and democratization through form as well as content.

With the “socially equalizing quality of his free verse,” Whitman was able to open up poetry to the masses, to the average, simple, uneducated American. This was something previously not possible due, in part, to inaccessibility of the rigid traditional

English forms of poetry. In his book, Naked Angels: The Lives & Literature of the

Beat Generation, John Tytell holds, “Whitman smashed the containing forms of nineteenth-century metrical structure in the manner that Blake began to in the

Prophetic Books” (225). The long-lines employed by Whitman in Leaves of Grass were revolutionary for American poetry, and this fact did not go unnoticed by fellow poets,

William Carlos Williams recognized him as the poet who “broke through the deadness of copied forms which keep shouting above everything that wants to get said today drowning out one man with the accumulated weight of a thousand tyrannies of the past, the very tyrannies we are seeking to diminish. The structure of the old is active, it says no! to everything in propaganda and poetry that wants to say yes. Whitman broke through that. That was very basic and good.” (Tytell 225)

Whitman ultimately had a vision of a democratic America, built from the ground up instead of from the top down, centered around his idea of adhesiveness, or manly love. 31

By breaking new ground in the literary landscape of the time in regards to form,

Whitman was able to strip away the pretentious qualities of poetry, and thus open up

American poetry to the average man, furthering his attempts to bring about democracy and sexual liberation, as he imagined it, in America.

“America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel”

One of the major traditions Walt Whitman left for future writers was the use of the long line in free verse poetry. Amitai Avi-ram even argues that “free verse and the resistance to traditional meter…together constitute one of Whitman’s most enduring legacies to later poets such as Allen Ginsberg ” (93). Ginsberg is fully aware that when Whitman broke new ground in terms of poetic form, he left a tradition of long- lined, free verse poetry in which future poets could follow. Howl is Ginsberg’s seminal poem, and it, with its long, strophic lines, places him in Whitman’s barrier- breaking form tradition. Ginsberg himself refers to Howl as an “experiment with the formal organization of the long line” (Deliberate Prose 230). Howl is a deliberate attempt to bring Whitman’s breakthrough in form into the twentieth century,

I realized at the time that Whitman’s form had rarely been further explored (improved on even) in the U.S.—Whitman always a mountain too vast to be seen. Everybody assumes…that his line is a big freakish uncontrollable necessary prosaic goof. No attempt’s been made to use it in the light of early twentieth century organization of new speech- rhythm prosody to build up large organic structures. (Deliberate Prose 230)

32

Ginsberg recognized the value of Whitman’s long lines of verse, and made an effort to follow in that tradition. With the publication of Leaves of Grass, Whitman did something so new and ground breaking that it would take essentially 100 years for someone, namely Allen Ginsberg, to try to breathe new life into the long-lined poetic form.

Ginsberg first read Howl in 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. It would become a decisive moment in Ginsberg’s poetic career. A few years after the reading, in 1957, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg worked together to publish a short review of the evening. In it, they talked about Ginsberg reading Howl, and they mention how it was “the most brilliant shock of the evening” (Deliberate Prose 240). More importantly, for this work’s focus at least, is the fact that they refer to Ginsberg’s use of form to push poetic boundaries, “The poem initiates a new style in composition in the U.S., returning to the bardic-strophic tradition of…Whitman…’til now neglected in the U.S” (Deliberate Prose 240). They continue, “improving on the tradition to the extent of combining the long lines and coherence of Whitman, with the cubist imagery of the French and Spanish traditions, and adding to that a fantastic rhythmic structure…” (240). Though he employs Whitmanic long lines in Howl, Allen

Ginsberg does not merely copy what Walt Whitman did before him with Leaves of

Grass. Instead, he expands on the tradition started by Whitman by combining new, more modern elements with those previously used.

Just as Walt Whitman used his form to reflect his content, so did Allen

Ginsberg. Howl is a seemingly frantic and spontaneous poem. “[O]ne of the poetic 33

models to whom Ginsberg turned was Whitman. Foremost among the attractions

Whitman’s free verse offers, presumably, is a sense of authenticity created by the appearance of spontaneity” (Avi-ram 110). The long, flowing lines lend themselves to a feeling of spontaneity as it appears they have been less molded than the lines of a sonnet, for example. In his book, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen

Ginsberg, Michael Schumacher notes, “Each line had [a] spontaneous, barely-in- control feeling” (201). Adding to the frantic, “barely-in-control” feel of the poem is the fact that, “Ideally each line of Howl is a single breath” (Deliberate Prose 230).

By reading the lines, each as its own breath, one gets a sense of being almost rushed through the poem:

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,/ who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness (Collected Poems 136) 34

Trying to read those two lengthy lines of verse in only two breaths really shows just how much they add to the already frantic content of the poem. John Tytell holds,

“The experiences in Howl, certainly in the opening part of the poem, are hysterically excessive and frantically alive” (19). Further, “It is the sheer momentum of nightmare that unifies these accounts of jumping off bridges, of slashing wrists, of ecstatic copulations, … a momentum rendered by the propelling, torrential quality of

Ginsberg’s long line” (Tytell 19). The intense, frenzied content of Howl is further driven by Ginsberg’s use of the long, strophic line, an effect most fully felt when hearing the work read out loud.

Again in the same vein as Whitman, Ginsberg’s efforts in attempting to queer the poetic landscape of America did not go unnoticed by his peers. Others were able to recognize the importance of what Ginsberg was trying to accomplish by employing strophic lines in Howl. Charles Bukowski wrote, “Ginsberg has been the most awakening force in American poetry since Walt W.” (quoted in Cherkovski 167).

Bukowski, and others like him, recognized that Ginsberg was indeed unsettling the literary landscape with his return to the use of the long line in his poetry. Just like

Whitman, Ginsberg strove to make new strides in poetic form, and he did so from the same approach we saw from Whitman. With Howl, Ginsberg took a different approach to poetry than most of his contemporaries. Neeli Cherkovski, in his book

Whitman’s Wild Children: Portraits of Twelve Poets, argues, “All the literary conventions had been thrown aside. Long, poetic lines became the rule, not the exception” (180). By returning to and revitalizing the poetic long line as seen in 35

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Allen Ginsberg, through Howl, was able to bring about a dramatic change in the literary landscape of his time. 36

Chapter III

“Resolv’d to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment”

It was not just Whitman’s form that was working to deconstruct the poetic landscape for his time. The content of Whitman’s work was also breaking down barriers. Throughout Leaves of Grass, Whitman speaks about homosexuality and even celebrates it, something groundbreaking for the time period. He once said,

I confidently expect a time when there will be seen, running like a half- hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown… (Martin xvii)

Whitman refers to homosexuality in the terms of “manly love,” or “adhesiveness.” He did not see homosexuality as a sexual or emotional deviancy. In fact, Whitman would speak of adhesiveness and democracy in America in the same verse; he saw the relationship between two men as an almost sacred one. Whitman’s vision of America hinged on adhesiveness as a means to getting past the heterosexual, wealthy, white male domination, and as a vehicle to move towards a truly democratic America, built from the ground up.

Perhaps Whitman’s most compelling display of homosexuality in his poetry is the “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass. However, the only explicit mention of 37

“adhesiveness” is in “Not Heaving from my Ribb’d Breast Only:” “Not in any or all of them O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life!/Need I that you exist and show yourself any more than in these songs” (Whitman 102). Here Whitman declares that adhesiveness, or homosexuality, is necessary to his life. He says that to understand him and his poetry, one has to understand the homosexual aspect of his life; he cannot be separated from it. By entitling the section, “Calamus,” Whitman uses the image of the calamus plant to further exhibit this idea of manly love. According to Bettina Knapp, “The

‘calamus’ is a plant, stalk, or grass with long, narrow leaves and a phallic-looking root resembling the penis and testes” (116) (Fig. 3.1). Thus the phallic-esque qualities of the calamus plant become central to Whitman and his poetic vision throughout the

“Calamus” poems. Keeping the image of the calamus plant and its phallic qualities in mind when reading Whitman really helps to drive home the ideas of adhesiveness in the poems themselves.

Fig. 3.1 38

The “Calamus” section is a coming out for Whitman; it is the “account…of his emerging self-awareness and his acceptance of this new self and the roles it offered him” (Martin 51). Whitman becomes fully aware of who he is as a gay man and poet.

He is not afraid to talk, at least candidly, about his homosexuality and how it is an intricate part of his life. He celebrates his homosexuality as in the last lines of “In

Paths Untrodden:” “I proceed for all who are or have been young men,/To tell the secret of my nights and days,/To celebrate the need of comrades” (Whitman 97).

These “secrets of [his] nights and days” are a reference to the fact that, at least up until

Leaves of Grass is read, Whitman has kept from sharing his feelings towards other men with anyone else. But, as it is a “need of comrades” and not a want or desire, he can’t hold it in any longer. The idea of adhesiveness is so universal in Whitman’s eyes that he addresses his words “for all who are or have been young men.” It is not directed at a certain group of men or young men. Instead, Whitman directs his words to all men, thus further exhibiting his democratic vision of adhesiveness, an idea very taboo for his time. The idea was so taboo that Whitman was even rumored to be fired from his job at the Interior Department because of the explicit homosexuality found in many of the poems in Leaves of Grass.

Throughout Leaves of Grass, and especially in the “Calamus” poems,

Whitman acts as a voice for all homosexuals. However, “Calamus,” the homosexual heart of Leaves of Grass, should not be taken as explicitly autobiographical. It is not necessarily indicative of an affair with a younger man, nor it is necessarily representative of some emotional occurrence that actually happened. Regarding the 39

“Calamus” section, Robert Martin says: “instead it offers a dramatized version of

Whitman’s acceptance of himself as homosexual and his realization of the consequences of that acceptance” (52). Whitman does not necessarily rely on his own personal experiences, but instead fictionalizes the effects of his self-awareness of his own sexuality. Though the experiences and feelings may be a fictionalization, they still work to effectively queer the poetic landscape.

While Whitman did celebrate his homosexuality, he at times also questioned and struggled with it. In “Earth, My Likeness,” Whitman writes, “For an athlete is enamour’d of me, and I of him,/But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible to burst forth,/I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs” (113).

Whitman is then left with a dilemma, “To write songs of homosexual love and still feel constrained to self-censorship is the terrible burden of the poet, which may in part drive from inner doubts, but also, in large part, from societal attitudes” (Martin 84).

Whitman lived in a society where homosexuality was not accepted, so he became stuck between embracing the essence of his sexuality, and thus coming to a further awareness of self, or repressing his true nature to conform to society. This is the problem faced by a man pushing bounds in his society. The title of the poem, “Earth,

My Likeness,” then, suggests the nature of Whitman’s inner self: calm on the outside, but volcanically active on the inside. He ultimately chooses to express his true self— therefore coming to a greater understanding of his nature as a homosexual man living within an American culture that disapproves of this nature—by continuing to celebrate the idea of adhesiveness throughout the rest of the “Calamus” poems. However, 40

Whitman does carefully choose his language, so that his words may still be interpreted in the realm of acceptable male-male relationships. This is perhaps why he edited the manuscript of “Earth, My Likeness” from the original “’an athlete loves me, and I him’ to ‘an athlete is enamour’d of me, and I of him’” (Martin 84). Whitman was careful that his poetry could still be understood as falling within the boundaries of societally acceptable male friendship, instead of it being seen as explicitly homosexual. However, when examined closely, I would argue that Whitman was indeed talking about homosexuality, despite the veil he may have placed over it.

Whitman also breaks new ground as he assumes various roles, being both active and passive in his sexuality, throughout “Song of Myself.” He did not lock himself into a one-dimensional role. He moves from receiver to giver: “Prodigal, you have given me love—therefore I to you give love!/O unspeakable passionate love”

(43). Whitman even assumes a voyeuristic role (taking the persona of a woman as he was wont to do) in the eleventh section of “Song of Myself:” “She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,/She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window./Which of the young men does she like best?/Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her” (34). Whitman places no emphasis on one role over the other. He constantly talks of repaying for the pleasures he receives. Whitman as both man and as a poet is too multifaceted, too full of possibilities to be tied down to one role.

Because of this, and because of his willingness to talk about his homosexual nature in his poetry, Walt Whitman was able to break down barriers in poetic content with his work in Leaves of Grass. 41

“Whole mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns of cock, Grand

Canyons of asshole”

Leaves of Grass, especially the “Calamus” section, is a coming out for

Whitman, who initiates a homosexual tradition in American poetry. 100 years later,

Allen Ginsberg joins in this homosexual tradition, and pushes it again to new levels with his extremely frank and open discussions of homosexual love, especially its physical aspects. For Ginsberg, Howl was his coming out. Michael Schumacher writes that Howl is

a work in which [Allen Ginsberg] clearly, for the first time, identifies his spirit, sympathies, and sexuality to anyone reading it. Obviously, all of Ginsberg’s friends were aware of these traits, but when he decided to publish Howl, he was doing so at considerable risk. (211)

Howl left Ginsberg naked and vulnerable. He exposes his soul to anyone who reads, and that takes considerable courage. After a reading of Howl, a complete stranger now has insight into the deepest and most intimate thoughts in Ginsberg’s mind. This leaves him open to ridicule and condemnation, but he takes the risk anyway. His thoughts and beliefs seem an attempt to affect the reader by opening their minds and providing them with new views on America and homosexuality. He is able to once again, just as Whitman did, queer the poetic landscape because of his new, fresh ideas and attitudes put forth by his discussion of homosexuality. 42

Ginsberg celebrated his homosexuality throughout his poetry, though he did so in an open manner that was not remotely societally acceptable in Whitman’s time.

Line 37 of Howl reads, “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy/who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love” (Collected Poems 136).

For Ginsberg himself, this became “the crucial moment of breakthrough” in the poem,

“Usually the macho reaction to that image of being fucked in the ass would be just like in this new James Dickey film, Deliverance, where it’s supposed to be the worst thing in the world” (Carter 312). To him, this discussion of anal and oral sex was “an acknowledgment of the basic reality of homosexual joy” (Carter 313). Ginsberg does not sugarcoat his stance of homosexuality; he does not shy away from frank discussion because he is not made to feel ashamed or intimidated by the heterosexual world. He steps out on his own into new territory. Ginsberg praises homosexuality in all its glory, including the sexual aspects of anal and oral sex. He aims to shock his audience through his language in order to show that, for him and many other gay men, there is true pleasure in being gay and being fucked in the ass. He wants to break the stereotypes of homosexuality and show that it truly can be a source of joy.

Though he predominantly openly praises homosexuality in his poetry,

Ginsberg, again like Whitman, struggles with it at times. His apprehensions are best depicted in the poem, “This Form of Life Needs Sex.” He starts the poem by saying,

“I will have to accept women/if I want to continue the race” (Collected Poems 292).

Ginsberg recognizes the inherent predicament of homosexuality: there is no way to 43

continue the race. If everyone were homosexual, the human race would come to a rather quick extinction. Thus, as the title suggests, the human race needs heterosexual sex to continue existing. Ginsberg truly sees beauty within men loving each other, but he also recognizes that it will get him nowhere in regards to furthering human beings as a species:

But no more answer to life/than the muscular statue/I felt up its marbles/envying Beauty’s immortality in the/museum of Yore--/You can fuck a statue but you can’t/have children/You can joy man to man but the Sperm/comes back in a trickle at dawn/in a toilet on the 45th floor--. (Collected Poems 293)

Ginsberg makes this poem very personal. It’s as if this problem of procreation has had a direct impact on his life. It’s as if, after having sex with a man and realizing his sperm will merely drip into a toilet, he grasped the fact that he was in no way able to help further the race by having sex with other men. It seems Ginsberg feels an obligation to continue the human species, but he does not know how to resolve the issue from his stance as a homosexual. He admires the beauty he sees in the love between men, but he also sees sterility. He thus is faced with the issue of either sticking to what he sees as truly beautiful, or accepting some sort of heterosexuality in order to contribute to the continuation of the human species. Despite his thought on the subject, Ginsberg does not ultimately achieve resolution within the poem; he does not identify with either option as his final choice. He makes it appear as though he is still contemplating his situation and weighing the results of each decision. Instead of providing this resolution, a sense that he has come to terms with the repercussions of 44

his conclusion, Ginsberg ends the poem with the line: “and that’s my situation,

Folks—“ (Collected Poems 294).

Through this frank and open discussion of homosexual love, both emotional and physical, Allen Ginsberg joined in the homosexual tradition in American poetry.

But, he was able to bring about a drastic change in American poetry by not simply becoming a copy of Walt Whitman. He breaks new bounds, using frank talk to bring about a change in the mind of the reader. He attempts to shock the reader into realizing that preconceived notions of homosexuality are indeed false, and that there is true joy and beauty to be found in all types of love between two men.

Conclusion

With their revolutionary breakthroughs in poetic form and content, Walt

Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, even though they lived 100 years apart, were both able to make significant contributions to the evolution of the American poem. With their form, Whitman and Ginsberg both made huge strides in making long-lined, strophic free verse an accepted form of poetry where it was in the minority, or just ignored, before they used it. Whitman started the tradition; then, Ginsberg expanded on it,

“While the pace and the autobiographical content of Howl shocked the sensibilities of

Ginsberg’s readers, the deeper significance of the poem was in its formal breakthrough. His long line was like a trip to the sun in the fifties: inconceivable”

(Tytell 19). Both men chose to break from traditional English forms of constricting 45

meter and rhyme, and broke out to show that poetry did not have to fit in such a mold.

They changed the literary landscape with their use of free verse, showing that poetry could still maintain a musical, rhythmic quality without being restricted by line length or rhyme scheme.

With their willingness to talk about homosexuality in their poetry, Whitman and Ginsberg were able to show that it was acceptable to be homosexual, and that there were others out there feeling the same things. As Leslea Newman says, “Finally,

I realized that I wasn’t a freak. There were others like me. A world of possibilities opened up before my eyes” (xi). Because they were fearless enough to put their homosexual nature to verse for all to read, Whitman and Ginsberg were able to open the closet for many who read their poetry. It broke new ground as it was outside of the normal, heterosexually dominant poetic tradition. It is with these breakthroughs in form and content that Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg were each able to break bounds and queer the literary landscapes of their respective time.

46

Works Cited

Avi-Ram, Amitae. “Free Verse in Whitman and Ginsberg: The Body and the

Simulacrum.” The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life after the

Life. Ed. Robert K. Martin. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992.

Carter, David, ed. Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996. New York:

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001.

Cherkovski, Neeli. Whitman’s Whild Children: Portraits of Twelve Poets. South

Royalton: Steerforth Press, 1999.

Folsom, Ed. “Whitman’s Calamus Photographs.” Breaking Bounds: Whitman and

American Cultural Studies. Ed. Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman. New York:

Oxford University Press, Inc., 1996.

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems: 1947-1997. New York: HarperCollins Publishers,

2006.

---. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. New York:

HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.

Knapp, Bettina L. Walt Whitman. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company,

1993.

Martin, Robert K. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry: An Expanded

Edition. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. 47

Newman, Leslea. “Foreword.” Walt Whitman. Annie Kantrowitz. Philadelphia:

Chelsea House Publishers, 2005.

Piercy, Marge. “How I Came to Walt Whitman and Found Myself.” “A Celebration of

Walt Whitman.” Ed. Michael Pettit. The Massachusetts Review. Vol. 33, No. 1

(Spring 1992), p. 98.

Schmidgall, Gary. Walt Whitman: A Gay Life. New York: Dutton, 1997.

Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg. New

York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial

Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Somerville, Siobhan B. “Queer.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies. New York:

New York University Press, 2007.

Tytell, John. Naked Angels: The Lives & Literature of the Beat Generation. New

York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1976.

Whitman, Walt. Leave of Grass and Other Writings: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed.

Michael Moon. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.

Photographs

Fig. 1.1: Whitman and Warren Fritzinger. Photographer: John Johnston. On the

Camden wharf, 1890. Courtesy of Charles E. Feinberg. 48

Fig. 1.2: Whitman and Bill Duckett. Photographer unknown. Camden, New Jersey.

1886. Courtesy of Ohio Wesleyan University, Bayley Collection.

Fig. 1.3: Whitman and Peter Doyle. Photographer: M.P. Rice, Washington D.C. c.

1869. Courtesy of William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Trent

Collection.

Fig. 1.4: Whitman and Peter Doyle. Photographer: M.P. Rice, Washington, D.C. c.

1869. Courtesy of Ohio Wesleyan University, Bayley Collection.

Fig. 1.5: Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Photographer: Richard Avedon. 1963.

Fig. 1.6: Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Photographer: Richard Avedon. 1963.