Whitman’s picture in "I Hear America Singing" of average people singing their "varied carols" was more than just a metaphor. It reflected a pre-mass-media culture in which Americans often entertained themselves and each other. Whitman’s spouting Shakespeare atop omnibuses, declaiming Homer and Ossian at the seashore, and humming arias on the street typified these performances in everyday life. His poetry tried to keep alive this participatory, dialogic spirit.

The speaker’s encouraging disposition . . . seems addressed to a female audience of unwilling participants in sexual activity: "Touch me," commands the Adamic figure in ["As Adam Early in the Morning"], "touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, / Be not afraid of my body." The appeal has shifted significantly since 1855, when the poet urged women and men to accept their own bodies and to find in that acceptance an avenue by which to admit others into communion with them.

These lines offer an instance of the paradoxical anti-institutional institutionalism . . . central to Whitman’s work. Here, this ambivalent stance might be understood as a particular response to a particular predicament: Whitman is simultaneously seeking to establish a tradition of homosexual ritual and struggling to distinguish it from the entrenched mores and ceremonies of the dominant heterosexual culture.

At some point, [Whitman] penciled a note on the script of the unpublished [poem] "Pictures": "Break all this into several pictures." That is, break open the casque of consciousness in which the images floated . . . and declare its single perceptions to be poems. Several poems from the Calamus sequence, like . . . "A Glimpse," are moving toward independence from the sponsoring mind. . . . In such poems, the order of observation implies a statement of sorts. . . . "A Glimpse" advances from outside to inside, from noisy barroom to quiet nook, from coarse camaraderie to silent intimacy.

[T]he (male) speaker of ["A Glimpse"] feels perfectly at home in the atmosphere of charged male sexuality (drinking, swearing, and "smutty jest"), although (one might say) he and his lover inhabit this sexually charged atmosphere differently from the way their fellows do. Hence the split subjectivity of this text: what is disencrypted in this lyric is what is invisible to the fleeting passerby and even to the denizens of the tavern as they "com[e] and go[ ]": the strong current of erotic intersubjectivity shared by the male couple who sit quietly together for "a long while."

Legislated Union, in the wake of failed resolutions and bloody compromises, seemed more than ever a contradiction in terms, a premonition given added vehemence in "For You O Democracy". . . . It goes without saying that these pious exhorations count as little more than stop-gap measures, wishful prophecies whose inflated optimism is portentous in its own right.

In one declamatory poem in the "Calamus" section, "For You O Democracy," he does attempt to celebrate "the manly love of comrades" for its contribution to the social cause of democratic idealism.

Whitman's increased emphasis on adhesiveness was also a response to the deep cultural fear among Northerners and Southerners alike that dismemberment would give rise to a civil or military dictatorship. In poem no. 5 (''For You 0 Democracy"), Whitman invokes the Union as something more than a legal compact that could be held together by the machinations of lawyers or the use of arms:

States!

Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?

By an agreement on a paper? Or by arms?

Whitman now offers his reader a radiant scene depicted with the objectivity and detail of such paintings by Thomas Eakins as "Max Schmitt in a Single Scull" or "The Swimming Hole." Both poem and paintings feature young men in a variety of activities: sporting on the grass, rowing in shells on the Schuylkill, shooting in marshes, and sailing before the winds. Whitman had always admired the candor and uncompromising reality of Eakins's paintings.

[T]he poet recognizes that the two men did share a reciprocal love that, just possibly, kept them going . . . and thus enabled them to find something of value in the war. The war made the relationship possible, and it gave the friendship, perhaps, a depth and immediacy it might not have had in other circumstances. Therefore, the surviving comrade will remember the personal I-Thou relationship that did exist, as well as recall the death that deprived him of his friend. The old soldier maintains a vigil that is at once a lament and a celebration.