The erotic Whitman

V. Pollak

The author explores the intimate relationships that contributed to Walt Whitman's imagination of masculinity in crisis. She maintains that in representing himself as a characteristic nineteenth-century American and in proposing to heal national ills, the poet was trying to temper his own inner conflicts as well. Integrating biography and criticism, Pllak employs a loosely chronological organization to describe the poet's multifaceted "faith in sex". Drawing on his early fiction, journalism, letters, and notebook entries, she shows how in spite of his personal ambivalence about sustained erotic intimacy, Whitman came to imagine himself as "the phallic choice of America".