Erkkila, Betsy. Walt Whitman's Songs of Male Intimacy and Love: "Live Oak, with Moss" and "Calamus" [review]

Betsy erkkila, ed. Walt Whitman's Songs of Male Intimacy and Love: "Live Oak, with Moss" and "Calamus." Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. xiii + 147 pp.In this provocative, timely, and useful book, Betsy Erkkila provides readers with the opportunity to trace the development of what eventually became the "Cala- mus" poems through their various stages of drafting, revision, and rearrangement. Walt Whitman's Songs of Male Intimacy and Love presents a facsimile and tran- scription of the little-known 1859 manuscript "Live Oak, with Moss" alongside facsimiles of the "Calamus" clusters of 1860 and 1881. Erkkila's "Afterword" seeks to revise the biographically orientated critical stance put forward by Alan Helms and Hershel Parker, who, in Erkkila's view, read Whitman's revisions of "Calamus" as the product of a "guilt-ridden homosexual poet [who] was engaged in a persistent and lifelong process of self-censorship, cover-up, and disguise after he had a single isolated love affair or 'homosexual crisis' in the late 1850s." Erkkila complicates any easy correlation between the biographical Whitman and Whitman's persona(s) on the page, arguing that "Live Oak, with Moss" "may be multiple, poetic, and not a simple or single narrative at all." She contends that "while the force of the poet's passion 'for his love whom I love' and 'my life-long lover' is clear," it is "unclear whether the poet refers to a man, men, a past or current lover or lovers, or some future fantasy lover." Erkkila's argument is most convincing when she says that "'Live Oak, with Moss' might be read as a daring poetic sequence of scenes, or tableaux, in which Whitman gives voice to a full range of fluid and ever-shifting states of body, mind and feeling." It is with these sensible caveats in mind that she provides a number of spirited close-readings and observations about the possibilities, but also, crucially I think, irresolutions of the texts presented. She also asks us emphatically to find out for ourselves-this book empowers readers to make their own minds up about Whitman's presentation of erotic, physical, social, and spiritual love between men.One of the most thrilling aspects of this book is also potentially one of its prin- ciple weaknesses. Erkkila writes with conviction that Whitman's songs "reveal a poet newly articulate about his public role as the evangel-poet of those sexual offenders and social outsiders who were-and still are-among the least visible and most oppressed within the putatively liberating but in fact heteronormatizing structures of the liberal state." It is certainly exciting that the "Calamus" poems should be reissued at this time of renewed hope-in the wake of the Perry v Schwar- zenegger federal decision, and just as Obama comes out in favor of gay marriage; indeed Erkkila's presentation of these works, along with her "Afterword," have an urgency and vitality reminiscent of the pamphlet or manifesto form. And yet at times, the poems feel as though they are being cajoled into an evangelism and political radicalism that Whitman so frequently resists. For Erkkila, these poems are "revolutionary"; they constitute "a radical departure in Whitman's work and in literary, sexual, and social history"; they are also "his most public and politically engaged." But these estimations are not always convincing: when the line "I am what I am" from "Live Oak" VIII is explicitly compared to Shakespeare's Sonnet 121-"I am that I am"-does this not point to the fact that Whitman engages with a tradition of homosocial poetry that stretches back at least to the sixteenth century? …