‘Dash me with Amorous Wet, I can Repay You’

Abstract

Walt Whitman’s poetry is famously full of ‘self’ and self-contradicting: ‘Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)’ The scholarly attention to paradox and contradiction often takes the form of an attention to various ‘binaries’ in Whitman’s prose and poetry; well-trod binaries include body-soul, sacred-profane, nature-culture, and woman-man. However, a queer attention to the poetic construction of such binaries reveals them to be fluid and ultimately nonbinary. Whitman and his speakers construct binaries that relate to religion, gender, and nature, but in poeticizing the construction of binary logic (e.g., man-woman), Whitman and his speakers reveal such purportedly self-contained and discrete domains to be open, fluid, and co-constituting. Recognizing the poetic performance of ‘binary’ logic will reshape reader’s understanding of ethical and political implications of Whitman’s queerly relational nature ethics.