Whitman's Children

Abstract

Looking at Walt Whitman's Civil War writings—especially his memoir Memoranda during the War and his letters of consolation—this essay argues that Whitman discovered in the war a way to enlarge the vision of sex and sexual possibility he had initiated in the “Calamus” poems of 1860. Taking as a point of departure the babies named Walt that were born after the war to soldiers for whom Whitman had cared, the essay describes the multiplicity of roles the poet inhabits in the war writing (mother, father, nurse, lover, confidant, scribe) and reads his acts of surrogacy as efforts to restore carnality, in its world-making force, to family and, in particular, to parenthood. Whitman's project of queer generation, the essay argues, usefully complicates recent scholarship on sex, time, and futurity.

Clustering of cognitive biases in Walt Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’: An Ecocritical Analysis

“…In an apparent attempt to ‘repudiate interpretation of his poems as celebrating homosexuality’ Whitman claimed to have fathered six illegitimate children (Bennett 2019, xvi), which – despite no good evidence – fed into repeated attempts to align him with a heterosexual norm, until the rise of queer studies prompted academic scholarship to accept the sexual ambivalence of his poetry as ‘defiant of simplistic categories and reductive generalizations’ (Killingsworth 2007, 111). The claim was recognized at the time as evasive (Coviello 2013, 83), but there is something more at play here. Peter Coviello demonstrates how, since the Civil War, Whitman had his own hard-won and unique perspective on family.…”

“…Peter Coviello demonstrates how, since the Civil War, Whitman had his own hard-won and unique perspective on family. Caring for wounded soldiers and writing letters to their loved ones, he developed a range of surrogacies as a ‘father and mother and friend and lover and uncle and comrade’ figure (2013, 77; original emphasis) with some of the soldiers whom he took care of, naming their sons in his honour and others calling him ‘father’, he knew he could indeed carry new generations forward, all of which made him wary of taxonomical dichotomies inherent in the then newly-minted clinical notion of homosexuality that he must have seen as failing to do justice to the rich complexity of his identity. Whitman ‘the binder of wounds’ (L. Edelman 2004, 108) therefore neither follows what Edelman calls ‘reproductive futurism’ nor rejects it.…”

“…Whitman ‘the binder of wounds’ (L. Edelman 2004, 108) therefore neither follows what Edelman calls ‘reproductive futurism’ nor rejects it. Instead, he leaves open a possibility that ‘a future can be something you parent, with and through sex but not heterosexual reproduction’ (Coviello 2013, 82). Or, as I argue here, through the act of artistic creation that both depends on and contributes to the body politic not only surviving, but flourishing.…”