American cultural historians long thought that as male and female spheres became separated with the rise of industrialism, men practiced aggressive values in the commercial marketplace while women, co...
Exclusive emphasis on either the physical or the spiritual Whitman misses his determined intermingling of the two realms. His earliest notebook poem contained the lines, I am the poet of the body / An...
Never trust the innocent
His chosen medium—writing—had, he believed, a high potential for holding America together. America was a nation of readers, known worldwide for its high literacy rates. At midcentury, a full 90 percen...
In a day before passive spectatorship and the mass media, entertainment was supplied by actual people—not just paid performers but also ordinary people alone or in groups. Whitman’s picture in I Hear...
He was mainly a romantic comrade who had a series of intense relationships with young men, most of whom went on to get married and have children. Whatever the nature of his physical relationships with...
Dear Sir—I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it,...
The inundation of the average American’s consciousness with profit-driven spectacles and images would not come until after the Civil War. Before the war, Americans attended to oratory with a seriousne...
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other. Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhy...
In the free, easy social atmosphere of pre–Civil War America, overt displays of affection between people of the same sex were common. Women hugged, kissed, slept with, and proclaimed love for other wo...
As he himself expressed it, his was the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths—the greatest in his belief in God and everyday miracles, the least in his acceptance of any church’s creeds.
The Richmond Enquirer, the South's leading paper, called antislavery senators a pack of curs who have become saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen and thus must be lashed into submission…. Let t...
Passionate intimacy between people of the same sex was common in pre—Civil War America. The lack of clear sexual categories (homo-, hetero-, bi-) made same-sex affection unself-conscious and widesprea...