REFERENCES

ALI, Manuel Said. Versificação Portuguesa. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2006.

ALLEN, Gay W. The Solitary Singer: a critical biography of Walt Whitman. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1955.

ALIGHIERI, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Available at: <http://www.divinecomedy.org/divine_comedy.html>. Acessed on April 20, 2007.

ANDRADE, Oswald de. Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar. São Paulo: Globo; Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1990.

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5 CONCLUSION (Part 21)

From “The Sleepers” we bring the passage that is mentioned in section 2.5.2, which depicts a swimmer’s death by sea water. As we have explained in that section, Whitman was a swimmer himself, and this scene portrays the death of a swimmer that is similar to the death of Carpus in the myth when competing with his friend Calamus, who died shortly after this event (2.5.1). As Whitman saw himself in everyone, it could be argued that the swimmer described in the scene is also a manifestation or projection of his own self, since the swimmer in the passage below is big, like him, and middle-aged. Although Whitman was thirty-seven years old at that time (“The Sleepers” was part of the 1855 edition, in which the poet sings in part 1 of “Song of Myself”: “I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin”), he was prematurely aged enough to look forty-five. As for the poem, it describes Whitman’s vision in his dream, in which he can see the dreams of the other dreamers. However, he also wanders during the day in the light. He is conscious of light and dark, life and death, and is content with both. He always accepts everything and everybody and excludes nothing.

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WHITMAN:

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2.5.4 Calamus: the political meaning

After this discussion about water, swimmers and relationships, let us again look at the reed, which is the result of the metamorphosis of Calamus after he dies. Although Whitman does not explicitly sing the myth of Calamus and Carpus, verses such as these, from the poem “Italian Music in Dakota” (“Autumn Rivulets”), show that this natural connection is possible in his poetry:

While Nature, sovereign of this gnarl’d realm,

Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses,

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2.5.1 The myth of calamus

There is a network of interconnections in Leaves of Grass around the word calamus, or reed. It points to several myths, meanings and details that lead us to many directions; however, they are all related in some way to this plant. It is as though the reed were a tree with various branches. We shall seek here to try and follow these branches to find the   flowers and fruits they might give us. First, it is necessary to go back in time to the account of the myth of calamus (or kalamos, in Greek), which will take us to the Greek mythological figure that bears this name:

Calamus, the son of the river-god Meander, his name means ‘reed’. He was in love with a youth named Carpus [Karpos, in Greek]. One day they were both bathing in the Meander and Calamus wanted to show his friend that he was the better swimmer, but in the competition that ensued Carpus was drowned. In his grief Calamus withered to such extent that he became a reed by the river bank. (GRIMAL, 1991, p.80)

From the start, we have an allusion both to male love and antiquity, that is, to a mythological past, the past that Whitman did not want to “repel”, as he stated in the first sentence of his Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. We can see in this very brief record of the myth the summary of what the poet wanted to express by the “Calamus” cluster: manly attachment, comradeship, “unphysical” or disembodied love between men, union, nationality. Certainly the title of this cluster was not chosen at random, for Whitman was an expert on inventing titles for poems and books. As indicated by the manly attachment of the myth, the “Calamus” poems are widely recognized as homage to male love, as is stated by Canby (1943, p.176) in his Walt Whitman, An American, “A Study in Biography” of the America bard:

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2.5 Addressing some themes in Leaves of Grass

This section comprises the following subdivisions: 2.5.1, on the myth of Calamus and Carpus; 2.5.2, on two other elements in the myth, water and swimmers; 2.5.3, on what happens after the death of Carpus; 2.5.4, on the political meaning of Calamus; 2.5.5, on Calamus, Carpus, aulos or ‘reed singers’; and 2.5.6, which discusses about “Language [as] fossil poetry”, the poetic function, Emerson, Blake, mediums, and Adam.