lties are reflected in some
of the yet extant letters from the enormous mass which Fitzgerald
addressed to "my dear Poshy."[94]

A great personality of recent times, widely regarded with reverence as the
prophet-poet of Democracy[95]--Walt Whitman--has aroused discussion by his
sympathetic attitude toward passionate friendship, or "manly love" as he
calls it, in _Leaves of Grass_. In this book--in "Calamus," "Drumtaps,"
and elsewhere--Whitman celebrates a friendship in which physical contact
and a kind of silent voluptuous emotion are essential elements. In order
to settle the question as to the precise significance of "Calamus," J.A.
Symonds wrote to Whitman, frankly posing the question. The answer (written
from Camden, N.J., on August 19, 1890) is the only statement of Whitman's
attitude toward homosexuality, and it is therefore desirable that it
should be set on record:--

"About the questions on 'Calamus,' etc., they quite daze me.
_Leaves of Grass_ is only to be rightly construed by and within
its own atmosphere and essential character--all its pages and
pieces so coming strictly under. That the 'Calamus' part has ever
allowed the possibility of such construction as mentioned is
terrible. I am fain to hope that the pages themselves are not to
be even mentioned for such gratuitous and quite at the time
undreamed and unwished possibility of morbid inferences--which
are disavowed by me and seem damnable."

It would seem from this letter[96] that Whitman had never realized that
there is any relationship whatever between the passionate emotion of
physical contact from man to man, as he had experienced it and sung it,
and the act which with other people he would regard as a crime against
nature. This may be singular, for there are many inverted persons who have
found satisfaction in friendships less physical and passionate than those
described in _Leaves of Grass_, but Whitman was a man of concrete,
emotional, instinctive temperament, lacking in analytical power, receptive
to all influences, and careless of harmonizing them. He would most
certainly have refused to admit that he was the subject of inverted
sexuality. It remains true, however, that "manly love" occupies in his
work a predominance which it would scarcely hold in the feelings of the
"average man," whom Whitman wishes to honor. A normally constituted
person, having assumed the very frank attitude taken up by Whitman, woul