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Whitman's Children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Peter Coviello
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Abstract

Looking at Walt Whitman's Civil War writings—especially his memoir Memoranda during the War and his letters of consolation—this essay argues that Whitman discovered in the war a way to enlarge the vision of sex and sexual possibility he had initiated in the “Calamus” poems of 1860. Taking as a point of departure the babies named Walt that were born after the war to soldiers for whom Whitman had cared, the essay describes the multiplicity of roles the poet inhabits in the war writing (mother, father, nurse, lover, confidant, scribe) and reads his acts of surrogacy as efforts to restore carnality, in its world-making force, to family and, in particular, to parenthood. Whitman's project of queer generation, the essay argues, usefully complicates recent scholarship on sex, time, and futurity.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 128 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 73 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by The Modern Language Association of America

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