Walt Whitman's place in U.S. letters is unchallenged: he is the poet of America, democracy, and individual freedom. Yet Whitman and his work have been misrepresented by scholars and critics during the 20th century, and it is only recently that they have begun admitting the poet's homosexuality and examining its effect on his work. Gary Schmidgall's bold and well-researched Walt Whitman: A Gay Life presents abundant and irrefutable evidence of the poet's vibrant sexuality and details Whitman's sexual and romantic affairs. More important, however, he explains how Whitman's attraction to men was at the root of his poetic vision: in Whitman's work the "body electric" is more than a metaphor. Walt Whitman: A Gay Life is a vital addition to Whitman studies and critical work on American literature.


From Library Journal
In Calamus #41 Whitman wrote, "Among men and women, the multitude, I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs...Some are baffled?But that one is not?that one knows me...I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections." Despite the seeming openness of his poetry, discovering Whitman the man has posed something of a problem for scholars, perhaps because many of them have failed to pick up on the clues he left regarding his sexual orientation. Schmidgall, who demonstrates an intuitive understanding of these clues, gets to the root of him. His sensitive reading of those "faint [and not so faint] indirections" in Whitman's poetry, prose, letters, manuscripts and recorded conversations results in a fascinating flesh-and-blood portrait. One may not always agree with his admittedly personal readings of particular passage, but ultimately the man who emerges seems both very real and very connected to the "gay" experience. For its unique and illuminating perspective, this work belongs in all academic and gay studies/literary biography collections.?David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersberg, Fla.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Renee Tursi
The irrelevance of Whitman's sexual activity to what his images, meter and line all served to affirm is dismayingly lost on Schmidgall....


From Kirkus Reviews
A book about ``the most gaily, muscularly, and relentlessly phallic writer in the annals of literature.'' Schmidgall, who is also Oscar Wilde's biographer (The Stranger Wilde, 1994), has chosen here not to write a biography in the usual way. Instead, he offers six long, thematically linked essays about the poet's gradual homosexual evolution, interspersed with candid first-person comments by Schmidgall (who is gay) that try to narrow the historical gap between gay culture in New York circa the 1850s and that of today. Because of Schmidgall's quite specific goals, this is not a good first Whitman biography for the layperson. Yet it holds other charms. Unlike most writers of ``lives,'' as a stylist Schmidgall gives himself plenty of breathing room. He rarely writes the sort of pared-down, minimalist declarative sentences that keep many other biographies going. Rather, his preference is loosely Whitmanian: orotund, spacious, personal, and rhythmic writing, which can make for bagginess and turgor at times. But two voices travel engagingly alongside each other, edging into an odd harmony: Whitman's and his biographer's. If that artfulness were not enough to beguile, then consider Schmidgall's intriguing range of subjects: Whitman's discovery of opera in midlife as the decisive influence on his mature poetry; a speculative chronicle of the writer's love life; Whitman's dogged amanuensis, Horace Traubel; the kinship between Whitman and Oscar Wilde, who met in 1882. It is an undeniable hindrance to Schmidgall's research effort that so little indisputable documentary evidence exists to prove his hunches about the identity and number of Whitman's amours. This lack of evidence can give the author's sometimes rhapsodic guesswork and impassioned assertions the feeling of willed fantasy. But the biographer's insights and imputations depend as much on his innate literary and personal sympathy for the poet, as he confides in detail in a fascinating autobiographical afterword. An unfailingly humane treatment. (photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Walt Whitman was a man of stunning contradictions. The publication of "Song of Myself" transformed him from an obscure poet into the voice of a nation. But Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, shocked the literary world with its avant-garde style and unabashed portrayal of the self. Committed to the full expression of his physical and intellectual lives, Whitman, ironically, spent much of his life masking his true sexuality behind an ambiguous cloak of respectability. Walt Whitman: A Gay Life is the first biography to illuminate the vital connection between Whitman's life as a homosexual and his legacy as a landmark literary artist. Here is the story of his encounter with the young Oscar Wilde, one of the most intriguing meetings of minds in literary history. Here, too, are the unadorned details about Whitman's relationship with Peter Doyle, his longtime companion, as well as the explicit poems Whitman suppressed from later editions of his published work.

FROM THE CRITICS

Peter Kurth

"Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch," Walt Whitman once remarked. "I stand for the sunny point of view -- stand for the joyful conclusions." Whitman's own words might be the epigraph to Gary Schmidgall's new "Gay Life" of the poet, a book so sure of its intentions, so joyfully attuned to its subject and so rewarding on every level as to seem itself like a sudden burst of sunlight in the fog.

"Give me now libidinous joys only!" Whitman wrote in his 1860 poem "Native Moments." "Give me the drench of my passions. Give me life coarse and rank!" He was at once the flower and the father of American poetry, the man who declared, in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, that America itself was "essentially the greatest poem" and that "the Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature." Whitman was also homosexual, if such a banal descriptive can be applied to a force of nature as enormous and unruly as Walt.

"I have a deeper reason than all that," he said, "the conviction that the thing is because it is, being what it is because it must be just that -- as a tree is a tree, a river a river, the sky the sky." And if a tree is a tree, as Schmidgall observes, "a gay man must be a gay man." It's as a gay man writing and reflecting on the life of another gay man that Schmidgall has produced this wonderful biography, which he structures not chronologically but through the prism of Whitman's friendships and sexual attachments. "Hitherto, scholarship has given us Whitman the Thinker," Schmidgall writes, "Whitman the Poet and Person, Whitman the Magnificent Idler, Whitman An American, Whitman the Poet of Democracy, Whitman the Prophet of a New Era," and so on and so forth. "Why should we not, by way of ameliorating the imbalance of emphasis at this late date, have something like Whitman the Gay Lover, or Pre-Stonewall Prophet, or Bather in Sex?"

Why not, indeed? You don't need a professor to tell you that the man who wrote the "Calamus" poems -- "To a Stranger," "City of Orgies," "Behold This Swarthy Face," "We Two Boys Together Clinging," to name only four -- had sex with other men in mind when he did so. Whitman was, in fact, so "bowled over by sex," in Schmidgall's phrase, that almost everything that flowed from the pen of this greatest and most American of American poets was homoerotic in nature.

"Whitman, of course," Schmidgall writes, "must have expected that his poems would be read by both idiots and savants of sex and those of every level of sophistication in between." The astonishing thing is that we've had to wait so long for a biography as judicious as this, by turns scholarly, original, beautifully written and infused with understanding. Schmidgall confesses at the outset that he is shamelessly "con amore" with his subject, and he isn't afraid to affirm that his own experience as a gay man gives him supreme authority to tell Whitman's tale. "Autobiography ... is the only real biography," Schmidgall writes. "And Walt agreed." A splendid book, and a service to American literature. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

Schmidgall (The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar) writes that his problem in dissecting the gay side of Whitman is that it is "a key-hole business. One has to [be]..., well, prurient." He succeeds in his endeavor. Schmidgall's early chapters employ a pomposity of language that is inadvertently comical, while an autobiographical chapter deals largely with his self-outing. While it is not news that Whitman lived a homosexual life, Schmidgall finds critics, even recent ones, to admonish for their Pollyanna blinders. Whitman himself comes off badly for his genteel "devolutionary editions" of Leaves of Grass, which obscure the risky language of earlier versions that braved certain calumny. His amanuensis for his cautious recollections, the devoted Horace Traubel, receives a chapter. He transcribed millions of the poet's words, hoping for revelations; though a physical ruin, Whitman was too astute for that. Schmidgall ends with a garrulous "Walt & Oscar," exploiting Wilde's visit to the poet in 1882. Illustrated. (Sept.)

Library Journal

In "Calamus #41" Whitman wrote, "Among men and women, the multitude, I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs...Some are baffledBut that one is notthat one knows me...I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections." Despite the seeming openness of his poetry, discovering Whitman the man has posed something of a problem for scholars, perhaps because many of them have failed to pick up on the clues he left regarding his sexual orientation. Schmidgall, who demonstrates an intuitive understanding of these clues, gets to the root of him. His sensitive reading of those "faint [and not so faint] indirections" in Whitman's poetry, prose, letters, manuscripts and recorded conversations results in a fascinating flesh-and-blood portrait. One may not always agree with his admittedly personal readings of particular passage, but ultimately the man who emerges seems both very real and very connected to the "gay" experience. For its unique and illuminating perspective, this work belongs in all academic and gay studies/literary biography collections.David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersberg, Fla.

Kirkus Reviews

A book about "the most gaily, muscularly, and relentlessly phallic writer in the annals of literature."

Schmidgall, who is also Oscar Wilde's biographer (The Stranger Wilde, 1994), has chosen here not to write a biography in the usual way. Instead, he offers six long, thematically linked essays about the poet's gradual homosexual evolution, interspersed with candid first-person comments by Schmidgall (who is gay) that try to narrow the historical gap between gay culture in New York circa the 1850s and that of today. Because of Schmidgall's quite specific goals, this is not a good first Whitman biography for the layperson. Yet it holds other charms. Unlike most writers of "lives," as a stylist Schmidgall gives himself plenty of breathing room. He rarely writes the sort of pared-down, minimalist declarative sentences that keep many other biographies going. Rather, his preference is loosely Whitmanian: orotund, spacious, personal, and rhythmic writing, which can make for bagginess and turgor at times. But two voices travel engagingly alongside each other, edging into an odd harmony: Whitman's and his biographer's. If that artfulness were not enough to beguile, then consider Schmidgall's intriguing range of subjects: Whitman's discovery of opera in midlife as the decisive influence on his mature poetry; a speculative chronicle of the writer's love life; Whitman's dogged amanuensis, Horace Traubel; the kinship between Whitman and Oscar Wilde, who met in 1882. It is an undeniable hindrance to Schmidgall's research effort that so little indisputable documentary evidence exists to prove his hunches about the identity and number of Whitman's amours. This lack of evidence can give the author's sometimes rhapsodic guesswork and impassioned assertions the feeling of willed fantasy. But the biographer's insights and imputations depend as much on his innate literary and personal sympathy for the poet, as he confides in detail in a fascinating autobiographical afterword.

An unfailingly humane treatment.