- Staten, Eros in Mourning, 60; Kerényi is quoted in Hyde, The Gift, 32.
31. “Myself and Mine,” originally “Leaves of Grass, 10,” LG1860, 224–226 (not a
“Children of Adam” poem). Whitman deleted two self-accusatory lines from the
1860 version of the poem: “Let others deny the evil their enemies charge against
them—but how can I do the like? / Nothing ever has been, or ever can be, charged
against me, half as bad as the evil I really am.” - Ludowick Muggleton, The Acts of the Witnesses of the Spirit (London, 1699
[1694]), 21; see Genesis 14:17–20. In Melville’s Pierre (1852) Pierre Glendinning’s
mother compares the youth’s infatuated conduct to that of “milksops and Muggle-
tonians.” - The Doyle testimony is cited in Emory Holloway, “Whitman Pursued,” in
On Whitman: The Best from American Literature, ed. Edwin H. Cady and Lewis J.
Budd (Durham: Duke UP, 1987), 105. Loving indicates (Walt Whitman, p. 381) that
Whitman showed some interest in certain women. An amusing application of this
antic (and sexist) theory of the semen appears in Laurence Sterne’s account of his
hero’s birth in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. On Whitman’s and the
era’s interest in “sound begetting,” see WWBB, 199–200; also “Unfolding the Folds.” - “With All Thy Gifts” (1872), LG, 401; Henry C. Wright, Marriage and Par-
entage: Or, The Reproductive Element in Man (1855; reprint, New York: Arno Press,
1974), 237–239, 246–251. - “Enfans d’Adam” no. 11, LG1860, 312–313; Bucke, Complete Writings of Walt
Whitman, 10:40. - “One Hour to Madness and Joy” (“Enfans d’Adam 6”), LG1860, 307–309.
- Gay Wilson Allen, The New Walt Whitman Handbook (New York: New York
UP, 1975), 89; an enlightening discussion of “Live Oak, with Mosses” to “Calamus” is
Hershel Parker, “The Real ‘Live Oak with Moss’: Straight Talk about Whitman’s
‘Gay Manifesto,’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51 (September 1996), 147–160. - The relation between the persona’s spermatic (“seminal”) experience and his
literary and mystical expression is discussed in Aspiz, “Walt Whitman: The Sper-
matic Imagination,” 273–289. - Lamont, Illusion of Immortality, 116–117. Lamont cites Kant’s Critique of Prac-
tical Reason, Book 2, ch. 2.
40.LG1860, 362–363. - This line does not appear in any published version of the poem, but only in
a manuscript in the Barrett Collection; still, it helps to indicate Whitman’s intent.
The poem’s earlier version announced that the poet was “thirty-eight years old,” plac-
ing its composition in 1857. See LG, 136–137; LGVar, 407–408.
42.LG, 118–119; Kuebrich (Minor Prophecy, 148) construes the calamus, the har-
diest of grasses, as a symbol of the victory of life over death. - Rossini, “The Rebound Seed,” 62; see also Vivian Pollak, “Death as Repres-
sion, Repression as Death: A Reading of Whitman’s ‘Calamus’ Poems,” The Mickle
Street Review 11 (1989), 64. Lewis Hyde says that this poem inspired D. H. Lawrence
to call Whitman the great poet of death (The Gift, 182). - Lawrence, “Whitman,” 13.
- Tapscott, “Leaves of Myself,” 221–222.
Notes to Pages 143–151 / 261