Whitman's Queer Children: America's Homosexual Epics
by Catherine A. Davies

Reviewed by Chisomo Kalinga

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Published: August 22, 2013

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Intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man—which, hard to define, underlies the lessons and ideals of the profound saviors of every land and age, and which seems to promise, when thoroughly develop’d, cultivated and recognized in manners and literature, the most substantial hope and safety of the future of these States, will then be fully express’d.

Whitman’s quote beautifully articulates his sense of the necessity of freeing the troubled and suppressed voice of the American gay male, a feat that he himself was the first to accomplish. Catherine A. Davies' Whitman's Queer Children: America's Homosexual Epics, the first published scholarly analysis of the gay epic poem, is an analysis of one branch of the lineage of this feat. It emerged out of a monographic study Davies wrote on five poems from four gay, male American poets – Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill, and John Ashbery. Davies’ objective with this study, and the text under review that grew out of it, is to ‘unravel the anxious relationship between the homosexual and his [sic] American home,’ in particular in relation to their place within the ‘Whitmanian legacy.’ As fate would have it, of course, the history of gay epic poetry in America would come to parallel, almost exactly, the history of gay thought in America.

Davies’ principle objective is to trace the poets under reviews’ integration of self-love and affirmation, and thus the greater integration of queer self-love and affirmation in American poetry and letters. Even at the advent of the gay epic poem, Davies’ writes, 'the poetry of Walt Whitman ... bears witness to a notable drive in American literature, if not in its legislation, to integrate same-sex desire into a vision of the nation.' This, for Davies, above all else, is the principle legacy bestowed by Whitman. Mark Turner has previously argued along these same lines: that those who followed Whitman (his analysis is mostly concerned with Ginsberg's Howl) were driven by the visceral imperative to publicize the private, to bring homosexuality into the forefront of public American discourse. Davies concurs, arguing here that Crane, Ginsberg, Merrill and Ashbery, to greater or lesser degree, used the confessional and epic narrative forms established by Whitman to participate in a political poetics that confronted the exclusory identity politics in America through the infusion of a homosexual consciousness in their poetry.

In her introduction, Davies defends her decision to follow the circumscribed structure of her monograph, limiting the scope of this present inquiry to these four male poets. She does so, she argues, for a very specific reason: rather than examining the emergence of the gay epic genre as part of a linear historiography, she instead positions each poem as an independent body of work situated in five specific historical time periods. Her intention is to assess each writer’s individual negotiation with both Whitman's legacy and America’s evolving national identity. Paradoxically, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the limited focus of her text, she successfully and powerfully illuminates the literary history of being a gay male in America as depicted in the American poetry cannon. Simultaneously she sheds new light on the evolution of the representation and preservation of queer identity in American literature and history.

Her interpretation of what constitutes the epic, following Bertolt Brecht’s formulation, defines the genre not via it’s narrative form, but instead via its social consciousness and political ideology. Her reading is also informed by the Foucaultian reading of sex, in which it is posited that ‘sex is placed by power in a binary system: licit and illicit, permitted and forbidden.’ In the first chapter, Davies focuses on the 'epic ambitions' of Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930), arguing that the poem’s relevance resides in its crucial endeavor to challenge the traditional, heterosexual and masculine posture of the epic genre, as well as the 'pedantic trappings of the traditional epic form.' The Bridge, she argues, is notable for its innovative effort to assert the authority of the homosexual experience as part of America’s cultural formation. In invoking a homoerotic affair between a white man and an indigenous American in the poem – the form of which alone seems, in its ferocious intensity, a deviation from the European counterpart – Crane sought to ‘claim the homosexual as the pure American’ by approaching and ultimately debasing one of Americas ‘founding myths.’ Davies argues that, although The Bridge might, due to the immense difficulties it presents to the average reader, be considered a problematic, if not potentially flawed epic, still, it is noteworthy and hugely significant precisely in that those same formal difficulties evince a pained psychological engagement with Crane’s historical surroundings.

Chapter 2 examines Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) and The Fall of America (1972), analyzing what Davies defines as Ginsberg’s attempt to navigate America's 'literal and figurative' heartland through a polemical, politically charged affront to the heteronormative narrative. The selection of these two poems reflect Davies's interest in the immense political and cultural transformations taking place in America at the time: Howl was written at the cusp of the civil rights movement, in the midst of the McCarthy witch-hunt era, a period during which gays in America were often accused of being biologically susceptible to falling prey to Communist ideology; the post-Vietnam poem The Fall of America, on the other hand, was published three years after the Stonewall Riots in 1969. The portrayal in both works of America as a dystopia on the brink of 'spiritual ruin,' Davies argues, is contrasted to the greater tone of Ginsberg’s poems as a whole, which strive to find root in a commonality within American discourse. Ginsberg writes in Howl:

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy…

The poem The Fall of America opens with the author masturbating in the midst of soldiers who are returning from the Vietnam War—an act Davies identifies with Whitman's ‘body electric.’ Ginsberg, she writes, is here immersed in a mythical vision not ‘only of his own bodies but of the bodies surrounding him.’ Davies argues that Ginsberg’s homosexuality was, as in Whitman and Crane, a ‘major catalyst’ to challenge traditional Anglo-American literary forms and the erroneous construction of the nation as a homogenous white, male dominated hetero-normative state. Davies differentiates Crane's and Ginsberg’s projects in that Ginsberg’s more overtly political and historical focus brought his poems, even if only partially, away from the poetic margins in which Crane resided, closer to the vernacular as spoken and experienced.

Chapter 3 addresses James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). In Davies reading Sandover is an apocalyptic narrative borne out of the author’s self-consuming obsession with his own inability to reproduce. The poem confronts the question: If the point of life is to procreate, then how is the gay man to assert his relevance? 'But in my garden nothing is planted,' Merrill writes. 'Neither is that glimmering window mind.' In Sandover, Davies suggests, Merrill asserts that the poem itself may function as the legacy that Merrill is otherwise denied. She argues that, 'Merrill presents childlessness as crucial to the justification of his (and his fellow homosexuals’) "ways to men." ' This type of survivalism, and the fact that the poem first appeared shortly after the onset of the AIDS epidemic (the first case was reported in the CDC reports and subsequently the New York Times in July 1981), only adds to the ambiguous, problematic complexity the text presents to queer theorists and literary scholars.

In her final chapter Davies’s discusses John Ashbery’s Flow Chart (1991). She interprets Ashbery’s epic poem, via its ability to ‘hold the minutiae of life firmly in sight, while attending to the "big things" of nation and history with which the epic is traditionally concerned,’ as evidence of the increasing confidence of social consciousness of its era. Certainly, it manifests this. And yet, if Crane’s poetry resided in the margins of poetic formalism, Ashbery’s poetry resided in some poetic constellation far beyond even that. While Davies does provide a fascinating analysis in this chapter on the relevance of Ashbery’s heightened awareness of identity and consciousness as it relates specifically to the evolution of the post-Whitman epic poem, she fails, one can argue, to successfully demonstrate any markedly political or even gay orientation in the poem. Davies herself acknowledges that Flow Chart’s subject matter is ‘not "about" anything that can be firmly anchored down.’ In particular, Ashbery generally does not engage directly with his own historical context, despite the fact that the poem was composed during the Reagan and Bush eras, when the arrival of the AIDS epidemic was accompanied by the most significant escalation in public demonization of homosexuals yet witnessed in America. Not does he seem particularly interested in foregrounding the homosexual experience within the poem. Despite her efforts, Flow Chart remains, even in her telling, a text more engaged with language systems than with human affairs.

In Whitman's Queer Children, Davies convincingly argues for the essentiality of bringing to bear the queer perspective on American literary and cultural history. Documenting a poetic genealogy that reaches back to Whitman, and the historical circumstances that prompted its necessity, Davies’ work documents a group of poets who insisted on the right to individual autonomy and self-expression. Davies presents a well-researched analysis of not only the poems, but of the poets, the historical contexts and societies during which they lived and wrote, and, not least importantly, of the ways in which each, in his own way, engaged with the burden of living and writing in the shadow of the man who first (publicly) expressed the need for America to consider a more diverse and inclusive identity. In this poetic family, at least, the American body’s truest metaphor may in fact be the inclusive melting pot.

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