{"id":13075,"date":"2026-05-30T22:44:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T02:44:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/walt-whitman-and-the-evolving-lexicon-of-love-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T22:44:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T02:44:23","slug":"walt-whitman-and-the-evolving-lexicon-of-love-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/walt-whitman-and-the-evolving-lexicon-of-love-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Walt Whitman and the Evolving Lexicon of Love \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

This essay is adapted from Traversal<\/a> and continues the story of the making of Leaves of Grass<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>With Leaves of Grass<\/em> already printed \u2014 by a Brooklyn friend, at the poet\u2019s own expense \u2014 Whitman had only to find a willing distributor who would root this uncommon book into the common soil of popular literature. He had the boldly entrepreneurial idea of approaching Fowler & Wells \u2014 New York\u2019s preeminent publisher of phrenological and physiological books, books Whitman had reviewed while working as a journalist at The Brooklyn Daily Eagle<\/em> and sold at his home bookstore. <\/p>\n

Like astrology, like racism, phrenology promised an instant way of knowing a person\u2019s character and predestined personality without doing the work of getting to know them or accounting for the choices they made in the course of living beyond the cards dealt them by chance. While Whitman had been making himself into a poet, the French physician, anatomist, and anthropologist Paul Broca made himself into the world\u2019s preeminent craniologist. Soon to found the Society of Anthropology to promote his theory that brain size holds the key to intelligence and that cranial measurements would establish \u201cthe intellectual value of the various human races,\u201d he was obsessed with the question of what determines success or failure in individuals, groups, and societies \u2014 a question he and his disciples considered the most important occupation of science. Only, their \u201cscience\u201d was in pursuit not of understanding the world as it is but of confirming their model of the world. Armed with his craniometers and his confirmation bias, Broca set out to measure the brains of dead European geniuses and African bushwomen slight of frame, devising a hierarchy of human value \u2014 men above women, whites above Blacks, the accomplished above the unaccomplished \u2014 which he pinned without hesitation on a purely biological explanation, willfully blind to all variables of social privilege or evolutionary adaptation. His work would lay the foundation for the \u201cracial science\u201d that would justify eugenics \u2014 that emblem of imperialism under the guise of science, with which those in power had replaced the divine rights of kings toppled by the French and American revolutions, hijacking science for the selfsame purpose of entitled exceptionalism and self-permission for tyranny.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Illustration from Orson Fowler\u2019s Practical Phrenology<\/em>, 1850.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By the time of Broca\u2019s death, his own brain joined the massive anatomical catalog he and his disciples had assembled, weighing in at an awkwardly average 1,484 grams, but still heftier than the 1,198-gram brain of phrenology founder Franz Joseph Gall. Whitman\u2019s brain would not be spared, landing somewhat between the two at 1,282 grams, 52 grams more than Einstein\u2019s. <\/p>\n

But the strangest, most staggering thing in all of this is the instinctual reaction we so-called modern humans have to the dangerous delusions of our ancestors, as though they are fossils in the intellectual evolution of our species. This is strange and staggering because human cognitive capacity has not measurably evolved for many thousands of years, which means that the obtuse ideas of our ancestors sprang from the same brains as our indignant indictment of them. It also means that the egregious delusion with which these eminent \u201cmen of science\u201d apprehended and classified the world sprang not from their intellectual capacity but from their cultural conditioning, which in turn means that a great many of the belief \u2014 confirmations we take for science today might render us the subject of posterity\u2019s indignant indictments.<\/p>\n

No one has captured this tradeoff between knowledge and certainty more poignantly than the great paleontologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould, who observed in chronicling Broca\u2019s legacy:<\/p>\n

\n

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein\u2019s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And yet the legacy of these pseudosciences is with us, built into the mausoleum of cultural history that is our language \u2014 the phrase well rounded<\/em> originated in the phrenological notion that an excellent personality is housed in a smooth, round head without bumps or the distinctive non-Euclidean cranial geometries of nonwhite races.<\/p>\n

While there was a cautious fascination with phrenology among learned Europeans, it grew especially and widely popular in America, a country only just beginning to grow corpulent with the same hunger for shortcuts that would render it the mecca of fad diets, infomercials, and pyramid schemes. Signs for phrenological readings proliferated on the busiest sidewalks. Some employers required job applicants to submit to one. The venerable phrenologist, publisher, and proto-social-scientist Orson Fowler was almost single-handedly responsible for it all. Four years before Leaves of Grass<\/em> was letterpressed into being, he had published one of the era\u2019s most popular \u201cscience\u201d books, Love and Parentage<\/em>. \u201cEducation is something, but PARENTAGE is EVERYTHING,\u201d he declaimed, \u201cbecause it \u2018DYES IN THE WOOL,\u2019 and thereby exerts an influence on character almost infinitely more powerful than all other conditions put together.\u201d The book would eventually go through forty editions, each selling thousands of copies and rendering him the era\u2019s preeminent expert on deducing character from the caricature of bone. <\/p>\n

With his reputation thus established and his royalties ensuring his solvency, Fowler could afford taking the risk of distributing a volume of an obscure poet\u2019s strange and daring verses \u2014 verses whose unselfconscious singing of the human body, that living cosmos of physicality, resonated with Fowler\u2019s own defiance of Victorian prudishness through physiology and his frank treatment of sex, albeit strictly hetero-normative sex. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Walt Whitman, 1850s.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For Whitman, phrenology promised a tangible bridge between the body and the soul \u2014 an irresistible allure for the poet who devoted his life to the struggle to reconcile materialism and spiritualism. A century before the birth of neuroscience, phrenology sought an organizing principle for the mind, just as alchemy had sought an organizing principle for matter centuries before the birth of chemistry. Whitman bowed before scientists as \u201cthe lawgivers of poets,\u201d listing the phrenologist alongside the astronomer, the chemist, the anatomist, the geologist, the mathematician, the historian, and the lexicographer. In the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass<\/em>, he reverenced scientists \u2014 \u201cof them and by them stand the visible proofs of souls\u201d \u2014 and wrote that the work they do \u201cunderlies the structure of every perfect poem\u201d \u2014 work that he called \u201ctheir construction,\u201d his word choice intimating just how much our understanding of reality is our own construction by the tools with which we probe it.<\/p>\n

In an epoch when gay<\/em> meant \u201cfelicitous\u201d and queer<\/em> meant \u201cstrange,\u201d it was in the strange world of phrenology that Whitman found the language to name his own nature. Weaving its singular terminology into his verses, he took a particular interest in two terms: amativeness<\/em>, defined as \u201creciprocal attachment and love\u201d between the sexes, and adhesiveness<\/em>, the \u201csusceptibility to forming attachments,\u201d particularly with persons of the same sex. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Illustration from Fowler\u2019s phrenological guides, with adhesiveness and amativeness highlighted.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Whitman described his own character as dominated by \u201cthe emotional and liberty-loving, the social, the preponderating qualities of adhesiveness,\u201d then exulted in a poem: \u201cO adhesiveness! O pulse of my life!\u201d When in love \u2014 his deepest love, a love without a possible future in the world he lived in \u2014 he cursed his \u201cdiseased, feverish, disproportionate adhesiveness\u201d in a private notebook, then transmuted the curse into a public benediction in his poem \u201cSo Long!,\u201d bidding farewell to the old world, blessing into being the new:<\/p>\n

\n

I announce justice triumphant,
I announce uncompromising liberty and equality,
I announce the justification of candor and the justification of pride.
[\u2026]
I announce a man or woman coming, perhaps you are the one,
(So long!)
I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate,
compassionate, fully arm\u2019d.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In \u201cthat fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it),\u201d he found the redemption of America\u2019s failing democratic experiment \u2014 he found \u201cthe counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof.\u201d He also found a new tongue for the unnamed regions of the spirit. In the first edition of Leaves of Grass<\/em> \u2014 the evolving volume that would always remain Whitman\u2019s workbook for figuring out the universe and his own soul \u2014 he had written in \u201cSong of Myself\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

There is that in me \u2014 I do not know what it is\u2014but I know it is in me.
Wrench\u2019d and sweaty . . .
I do not know it \u2014 it is without name \u2014 it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print.<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By the third edition, published in 1860, he was ready to write of the \u201cpent-up aching rivers\u201d inside him, ready to be \u201csinging the phallus,\u201d \u201csinging the muscular urge and the blending,\u201d \u201csinging the bedfellow\u2019s song,\u201d the \u201cresistless yearning,\u201d his \u201clove-flesh tremulous aching.\u201d And yet he was still \u201cseeking something yet unfound though I have diligently sought it many a long year.\u201d The aching, the yearning, the seeking, was not for the undamming of the inner river but for the naming of it, the mapping of it across the territory of the comprehensible.<\/p>\n

In the ninth month of his forty-first year, readying the third edition of Leaves of Grass<\/em>, Walt Whitman sat down to compose what we, ahistorical in our lexicon, might consider his coming out. Titled \u201cCalamus\u201d after Acorus calamus<\/em> \u2014 a tall wetland flowering plant native to his birthplace, Long Island, the sand-duned end of America, also known as sweet flag for its strong erect leaves and solid cylindrical spadix \u2014 this would always remain his most overtly erotic lyric sequence, the one in which he included his elegy for his New Orleans heartbreak<\/a>. The sequence is often referred to as Whitman\u2019s \u201chomoerotic\u201d epic \u2014 a definition narrowed not only to sexuality alone but to a sexuality that exists solely as an antipode of the heteronormative paradigm. Such a reading flattens the substance to the surface, for the \u201cCalamus\u201d poems are Whitman\u2019s love poems\u2014his only overt love poems. Among them is a short meta-poem vibrating with the vulnerability of writing these verses at all:<\/p>\n

\n

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Walt Whitman by Rockwell Kent<\/a> for a rare 1937 edition of Leaves of Grass<\/em>. (Available as a print and more<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But while Whitman boldly celebrated his intimate sympathies in verse, he remained restive about them and sought to fathom himself through what he, along with his generation, thought to be science. Again and again, Whitman returned to phrenology\u2019s amativeness and adhesiveness, charging his poetry of contrasts with this battery of words, locating his own coordinates in relation to them, making sense of the world, making sense of himself in relation to the world and of the world\u2019s totality in relation to its multitudes. Out of the language of a pseudoscience, he sculpted a new vocabulary of elemental personal truth. In the \u201cCalamus\u201d poems, he dares imagine in the public plane what felt so intolerable on the personal \u2014 not only the total acceptance of his nature, but its consecration of an entire species of love:<\/p>\n

\n

For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-root shall,
Interchange it youths, with each other! There shall from me be a new friendship \u2014
It shall be called after my name.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

How much more poetic it would be to call ourselves Whitmanic or Waltean rather than homosexual or bisexual or queer or any other term etymologically rooted not in the lush wetlands of nature but in the strangeness, the otherness of the counternatural, describing us not by what we are but by what we are not. <\/p>\n

Looking back on his life from his deathbed, Whitman would proclaim in one of his final poems:<\/p>\n

\n

I announce adhesiveness, I say it shall be limitless, unloosen\u2019d,
I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This essay is adapted from Traversal and continues the story of the making of Leaves of Grass. With Leaves of Grass already printed \u2014 by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13076,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}