Gay Today: Interview

Gary Schmidgall:
Walt Whitman Scholarship at its Best

Interview by Jack Nichols

Gary Schmidgall

Gary Schmidgall has carved a meaningful niche for himself as one of America's foremost Whitman scholars. His Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (Dutton) was the first no-nonsense biography of America's greatest poet. Next, Professor Schmidgall's canny selection of poems by Whitman-Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855-1892, A New Edition (St. Martin's Press) highlighted Whitman's earlier verses-some of his most ecstatic and soulful-particularly those expunged from later editions of Leaves of Grass.

Most recently, Schmidgall has edited some 5,000 pages that were compiled by Horace Traubel who took care of Whitman during his final years. Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman's Conversations with Horace Traubel, 1888-1892, is called "an invaluable resource" by Publisher's Weekly. It helps, perhaps more than any other book, to bring the private, companionable, and completely candid Walt Whitman to life.

Jack Nichols: When I was fifteen, the European grandfather of gay lib, Edward Carpenter, introduced me through his essays to Walt Whitman. By the time I was thirty, both Lige Clarke and I had come to regard Whitman as a mentor in all matters relating to sex, love, and even politics. We promoted him wherever we spoke on the gay liberation trail.

I wonder if you feel, as I do, that Whitman's perspectives need much more dissemination in our public schools, or even, perhaps, that he deserves to be turned into a fountainhead, not only of what we loosely call gay culture, but of American culture as well?

Gary Schmidgall: Whitman, I am convinced, wrote much that he hoped the homosexuals among his readers would take to heart and be encouraged by (and I use "encourage" in the sense in which Allen Ginsberg called Whitman our great "courage-teacher"). But what must be emphasized primarily in our schools and elsewhere is Whitman the poet of the wide embrace. "My gait is no faultfinder's or rejecter's gait/ I moisten the roots of all that has grown," he said when he made his debut in 1855 with Leaves of Grass. And toward the end of his life, he told Horace Traubel, "America means above all toleration, catholicity, welcome, freedom." That's why he was a "let-them-all-in" man on the subject of immigration-and why he was an enemy of tariffs and protectionism.

The thrust of my work on Whitman has been to establish his sexual identity as a part-a very important and hitherto not sufficiently grasped part-of Whitman's identity as a man and a poet. But to exaggerate this identity would be to do what caricaturists do: exaggerate one feature of the face at the expense of all the others. Gay culture is welcome to clutch Walt to its bosom, but let's not be too selfish and possessive of this camerado who heard America-and not just a gay men's chorus-singing.

Jack Nichols: You've written other books, about Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. You've also written a work titled Literature as Opera and Shakespeare and Opera. In Whitman's day, opera provided the ordinary working man with his main conduit to theatre. Your Walt Whitman: A Gay Life notes how the poet loved going to the opera. I sometimes wonder: Was it through your own interest in opera that you delved into Whitman studies?

Gary Schmidgall: I vividly recall the exact moment my "Whitman decade" began, and it couldn't have been more appropriate. I was walking down Whitman's favorite thoroughfare, Broadway, one afternoon, across the street from Verdi Square at 72nd Street, where the "Lion of Busseto" looks down with a characteristic glower. Among several used paperbacks laid out for sale on the pavement, my eye caught a volume titled Walt Whitman and Opera. I pulled out a dollar and bought it.

The youthful Walt Whitman

Later, I began thumbing through it. It was a good book but old-fashioned (it was published in 1951), and it did not, I thought, do justice to the psychological and sexual intersections that figure in Walt's tremendous devotion to opera in the decade or so before Leaves first appeared. The first chapter of A Gay Life became an elaborate look at Walt Whitman the opera lover and the influence of prodigious vocalism on the poet's life-long song of himself. So, you see, I have good reason to nod affirmatively whenever I read one of Walt's several exultant Broadway poems.

Jack Nichols: Previous Whitman scholars such as Gay Wilson Allen took pains, it seems, to ignore Whitman's sexuality. What encouraged you to write Walt Whitman: A Gay Life?

Gary Schmidgall: . Whitman the opera lover was the "hook" for me, but soon I was reading generally in the biographical and scholarly literature on Whitman. A conviction began to build slowly but then snowballed into almost dumbstruck astonishment. I became at once bemused and appalled at the fecklessness, cluelessness, and (in some cases) even cynical determination to ignore or conceal which seemed to be the rule when it came to dealing with the homotextuality and homo-subtextuality of Whitman's poetry, prose, and surviving correspondence and manuscripts.

Certain pronouncements really set me off-like the venerable Harold Bloom's hilarious opining that Walt must never have had sex with another person, or (in a more recent book that won the Bancroft Prize) David Reynolds's elaborate attempt to convince us that there was an epidemic of rambunctious same-sex bonhomie in Walt's day but that it was entirely non-sexual. The most recent massive "standard" biography of Whitman (University of California Press, 1999), Jerome Loving's, is fine in many ways, but on the subject of sex Loving reverts to the skittish, nervous hand-wringing that I had fondly hoped was "of yore." And, needless to add, I found much to aggravate in countless Whitman studies that appeared in the decades before Stonewall.

Thus aroused, I decided that the time was ripe and the need clear for a biography that looked without blinking where so many critical eyes had gingerly and politely diverted their gaze. This was the least I could do for a man who had a hawk's eye for the sight of an attractive man. . .a man who wrote in one manuscript version of a poem, "O I saw one passing alone, saying hardly a word-yet full of love I detected him by certain signs/ O eyes wishfully turning! O silent eyes!" Enough silence on the subject, I thought.

Jack Nichols: Whitman's approach to sexuality-"what is more or less than a touch?"- encourages, it seems to me, a well-rounded route that enhances sensuality. It isn't a groping or grabby kind of sexuality, but one in which all of the poet's senses seem to be involved. It seems to me that he successfully circumvents those old vestiges of puritanical body-hate vouchsafed to America through orthodox religious veins and provides a kind of expansive self-awareness that many citizens currently lack. What do you think?

Gary Schmidgall: Whitman, we all know, sang the body electric, and the preachers and puritans of his day recoiled as if they had been electrocuted. They were right to see Walt as a dangerous enemy, for it was his agenda to reverse their two-millennia-long attempt to establish the radical dichotomy of "soul" and "body" (soul good, body bad). He is constantly reiterating the (shall we say?) democratic equality of body and soul.

Right up front, near the beginning of "Song of Myself," his great poetic entrance-aria on the American literary stage, he admonishes: "I believe in you my soul. . . .the other I am must not abase itself to you,/ And you must not be abased to the other." The "other I am" is, of course, the body: no abasement, either way. Our unique individual human identity cannot be realized except through the body and its senses. By the way, Oscar Wilde, too, was to make the sanitary integration of body and soul one of the centerpieces of his philosophical agenda (it was central to the agenda of the greatest 20th-century philosopher of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche).

This is why touching not only one's own body but touching another's carries such electric excitement in Whitman. One of my favorite Whitman passages (and one of the most daring) is in "Song of Myself" and begins, "To touch my person to some one else's is about as much as I can stand." And then follows one of the most memorable attempts to express the thrill of sexual arousal: "Is this then a touch? . . . . quivering me to a new identity,/ Flames and ether making a rush for my veins. . ."

The American social Establishment became apoplectic over Walt in this vein, especially the pulpit-thumpers. And, at least in private, Walt gave the preachers hell. "Damn the preachers!" Walt told Horace, "the smooth-faced, self-satisfied preachers." A whole chapter of Intimate with Walt is devoted to his conversational fulminations at ecclesiasts. His most sarcastic poem on the subject, I would say, is "The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete."

Jack Nichols: An Indian scholar, Dr. V.K. Chari, wrote Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism in 1964. His likening of Leaves of Grass to verses in the Hindu scriptures seems to back up Henry David Thoreau's contention that Whitman is "wonderfully like the orientals." Witter Bynner, who translated Lao Tzu's Way of Life, indicated much the same thing when introducing his translation. He wrote of Lao Tzu that "twenty-five centuries before Whitman, he knew the value of loafing and inviting one's soul; and the American poet, whether or not consciously, has been in many ways one of the Chinese poet's more eminent Western disciples." Do you think that Whitman had any significant access to the Hindu scriptures or to Lao Tzu's little book? Or do you think he simply accessed a kind of sound and earthy wisdom that these earlier seers had known in their own times?

Gary Schmidgall: I cannot recall, in my research, coming upon any suggestion of extensive interaction or study of Eastern philosophies. Whitman's early education and reading were clearly serendipitous and scattery, and of course he never went to college. At any rate, he was no philosopher and no theorist; he was too much the loafer, the lay-about to go in for the long professorial haul. His remarks on his swimming ability to Horace are apropos: "I always hugely enjoyed swimming. My forte was-if I can say it this way-in floating. I possessed unlimited capacity for floating on my back-for however long; could a most take a nap meanwhile. . .I was a first-rate aquatic loafer." Maybe this serene quality of "opting out" from the busy capitalistic rat race gives Whitman an "Eastern" philosophical flavor. One thing is clear: Whitman is very popular in China (he's been translated into several of the nation's dialects). And a world congress on Whitman took place there just last year.

Jack Nichols: When editing Horace Traubel's daily compilations of Whitman's conversations with him, what were some of your more significant findings?

Gary Schmidgall: For Walt Whitman: A Gay Life I felt obligated to read all nine volumes of the Traubel-Whitman conversations (they were published between 1906 and 1996 under the title With Walt Whitman in Camden). So when I decided the world might usefully be saved the trouble of reading The Whole Thing, I already had a good sense of the veins of significant gold in this Sierra of transcriptions. My main, overall finding is captured by the operative word in my title, "intimate."

Over the decades, largely in response to often amazingly cruel and vituperative published criticism (and doubtless widespread gossip, slander, and veiled innuendo that was not published), Whitman developed a very thick skin. He almost never condescended to respond to criticism, and became in many respects aloof, non-committal, polite, and (as one friend said) "granitic" in his composure. He resisted interrogators (and autograph-seekers!), finding "no comment" very easy to say. What Traubel's transcriptions give us, then, is Whitman with his hair down and his tongue loosened: the poet at ease among trusted friends, willing to say what he really thinks about idiotic presidents (Benjamin Harrison really got his goat), slow printers (shove a needle up their ass, he jokingly suggests one day), pompous preachers, and corrupt Camden politicians (he'd feel right at home there today: three Camden mayors have gone to jail in the last twenty years!). To indulge in a little Wildean alliteration, pert (a favorite word of Walt's), puckish, and often passionate are the words that come to mind to describe the poet we become acquainted with in Intimate with Walt. And, since Walt had a penchant for making up new words, let me add one of my own: petardant. The word "petard"--made famous by Hamlet's remark about the enginer "hoist" (blown sky-high) with his own petard--is defined in Webster's as "a case containing an explosive for use in breaking down a door or gate or in breaching a wall." Leaves of Grass is precisely such a case. His spirit was petardant.

The conversations also get us into Walt's nooks and crannies. We learn about his taste for alcohol and his ridicule of the smoking habit. We learn that he hated the women Emerson was surrounded by, and that he could even say some harsh things about this great idol of his. We learn that Walt's reputation for having no sense of humor (which Leaves of Grass, it must be admitted, tends to bear out) was the subject of some good humor in his Mickle Street house. And there is in fact much to smile and chuckle at in Traubel's 1.9 million words.

Read Leaves and you are left in no doubt that "the greatest poet" referred to in the preface to the 1855 edition is named Walt Whitman. Read Intimate with Walt, I'd like to think, and you will gain a good sense of what Whitman the (old) man was like.

Jack Nichols: Do you think that Traubel may have been gay?

Gary Schmidgall: Traubel was married (the hitching took place in Walt's bedroom-study) and fathered a son and daughter. The son died young, but the daughter lived on to oversee volume 5 of With Walt Whitman in Camden in 1964. But this, of course, may be beside the point, as the case of Oscar Wilde makes famously clear. As it happens, in recent years two scholars, Joann Krieg and Ed Folsom, have discovered in the Traubel collection in the Library of Congress correspondence that suggests Traubel had two homosexual affairs in the decade after Whitman's death in 1892. (I discuss this in my introduction to Intimate with Walt) Traubel certainly showed himself comfortable discussing the subject in the pages of the liberal-thinking monthly magazine, The Conservator, which he founded and edited for nearly three decades. When Edward Carpenter's ground-breaking study of homosexuality, The Intermediate Sex, appeared in 1913, he covered it favorably, writing: "A friend of mine picked Carpenter's book up off my desk [and said] 'He's a brave man to write on that subject.' He's neither a brave man nor a cowardly. Just honest. He's not presenting a situation. He's scientific. It is a subject about which most everybody refuses to talk decently."

Jack Nichols: Whitman's earlier poems were, as you've noted, marked by rushes of sensuality and passion that were somewhat absent in later editions of the Leaves. You've managed to capture the earlier spirit of the Leaves in your selection Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855-1892, A New Edition. I very much welcomed this selection of yours because my own favorite copy of the Leaves has been the second edition, now out of print. Why, in your own words, were you moved to compile this selection?

Gary Schmidgall: Your favorite copy is 1856? That is interesting, since it happens to have been the smallest in size-a sextodecimo, as the bibliographers call it (sixteen leaves to a printer's sheet of paper). But I do hope your favorite edition is 1860, which contained the gay-drenched Calamus sequence in its full glory for the first time!

Jack Nichols: Yes, yes! It was the 1860 edition. I'd imagined that that was the second. But you're right, it was the third edition.

Gary Schmidgall: And I would also say that it is within reasonable distance of being unanimous among Whitman aficionados that the great and truly characteristic Whitman is the poet of the first three editions of Leaves of Grass (1855, 1856, 1860). And 1860 being by a long margin the largest and most multifaceted, my view is that it shows Whitman at the height of his powers.

My initial impetus for considering this unprecedented new edition was that I found myself, in quoting from the poetry to support my views about Whitman's sexual identity and activity, relying on versions of the poems in these early editions. For it is in these editions that Whitman was most uncompromising, candid, daring, even (considering his day and age) reckless in his agenda of extricating the sexually active body from the veils of shame.

Another impetus was a growing conviction that, on the whole, Whitman was not a wise reviser. His revisions over the decades leading up to the so-called "Deathbed" edition of 1891 that he gave his imprimatur to, I feel, tend to denature and tone down and withdraw, as it were, from the exciting ramparts of innovation and courageous subversion. I was eager for readers to confront Whitman the great poet of first inspiration.

By arranging the poems in order of composition (which has never been done before), I also thought it would make it much easier to see how his poetic career, which lasted after all for about 50 years, unfolded, how he transformed from a fearless, nervy, and disconcerting bringer of a new era (see his wonderful little poem "Beginners") into the more benign, valetudinarian, somewhat bombastic, America-boosting "Good Gray Poet" of his later years. I was encouraged in this when I noted that two of Walt's most devoted friends, the Englishwoman Anne Gilchrist and his beloved Richard Maurice Bucke, a Canadian doctor, both hated to see Whitman make revisions. And Bucke was not shy about telling Walt, the year before the poet died, that he wrote his best stuff before the Civil War: "Of course, you do not write now as you did in the 'Song of Myself' days-in power there has been since then a tremendous drop-but that drop occurred in the early '60s."

Jack Nichols: What are some of your favorite poems in Leaves of Grass?

Gary Schmidgall: My favorite poems! Remember that my edition of the poems is a "selected"! Another impetus for the edition was to select the best and leave the lesser achievements out (the selection is still generous, I think, including about 75% of his lines). So you are really asking for the favorite of my favorites, and that's tough.

"Song of Myself" (which, in the 1855 edition, was one of several poems called Leaves of Grass) must have pride of place, of course: a stunning aria by the coloratura singer of everyone's "real Me." There's never been a poetic debut to compare, though Ginsberg's "Howl" comes in a close second. Whitman told Traubel that opera was a profound influence on Leaves, and the poem that most brilliantly demonstrates this is "A Word from the Sea" (which later became "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"). It's the poet's Liebestod.

Of course, I am very fond of certain wonderful poems in my edition that Whitman later suppressed because they came to seem (I guess) just a little too "out." These are in none of the "Deathbed" editions that crowd Barnes & Noble and Amazon. I think of Calamus #8 ("Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice"), in which the poet announces "I will go with him I love,/ It is enough for us that we are together-We never separate again," and Calamus #9 ("Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted"), which is about the pain of having a lover leave you. One suppressed poem that perfectly captures the pain one feels at being at the mercy of a lover is short enough to quote in full:

Not My Enemies Ever Invade Me
Not my enemies ever invade me-no harm to my pride from them I fear;
But the lovers I recklessly love-lo! how they master me!
Lo! me, ever open and helpless, bereft of my strength!
Utterly abject, grovelling on the ground before them.

I love "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun," with its two halves capturing the tension between the sunlight of respectable, sanitary, natural country life and the thrilling, dangerous, intense life of nightime Mannahatta (as he liked to call New York City).

And I might add one more poem to this ridiculously short list of favorites. It is, possibly, the most quintessentially Whitmanesque short poem of all-just ten lines: "A Noiseless, Patient Spider." It is about that primal urge in Whitman, namely, the urge to make meaningful, loving contact with another person. Whitman likens his soul to a spider launching forth "filament, filament, filament, out of itself" to form a "bridge" to another. The poem becomes especially poignant if you look at a prior manuscript version of it (included in the endnotes of my St. Martin's edition) and find that the poem grew out of seeing another man on a city street and yearning for the love of him.

Jack Nichols: Whitman saw his Leaves as a kind of secular bible, it seems. Noting how this is a world of religions, he said, "I too descend into the arena." How do you interpret this approach of his?

Gary Schmidgall: As I have already noted, Whitman was allergic to organized religion, doubtless in part because of his Quaker roots. As he told Horace, "A curious affinity exists right there between me and the Quakers, who always say this is so or so because of some inner justifying fact-because it could not be otherwise." (That phrase "inner justifying fact" gets you pretty close to the heart of Whitman.) One day he also admitted to Horace, "I often get mad at the ministers-they are almost the only people I do get mad at." And there are such lines in Leaves as "logic and sermons never convince" and "Allons. . .O bat-eyed and materialistic priests." And, not to put a fine point on it, Walt told Horace, "I see no use for the church: it lags superfluous on the stage."

Clearly what galled him about them was their intolerance of the "other"-other sects, other religions. He would doubtless be appalled at how progress in the amelioration of humanity on this planet is being obstructed by theocentric warfare. What he said on 16 December 1888 (a Sunday, be it noted) to Horace should be a motto for us now. Referring to the afterlife that so concerns the faithful, Whitman warned: "The important thing to us now is the life here-the people here: yes, that's the important immediate thing: the earth struggle-our effort, our task here, to build up the human social body into finer results. . . the beyond we are not called upon to bother about it. . . our responsibilities are on the earth."

Jack Nichols: In his lengthy 1873 essay, Democratic Vistas, Whitman denounces the influx of moneyed interests into politics. It is almost as if he was warning in advance of those corporate moguls today who stuff the pockets of American politicians with cash deposits. Do you see Whitman's prophetic political perspectives too?

Gary Schmidgall: As I was making my Intimate selections, I was constantly muttering plus ça change. Indeed, before the last presidential election I put together a little divertissement in which Walt was asked questions pertinent to the 2000 campaign. Ten days before the election, in fact, the Washington Post ran it on its Sunday op-ed page. All of Walt's piercing responses were taking from the chapter in Intimate with Walt titled "Views of America." And many of his corrosive remarks on the money-grubbing priorities, the spiritual deficit that we are running up nowadays, seem even more pertinent in post-Enron America. I could choose so many apt fulminations (they are very much in the spirit of his fierce attack on a frantic, capitalist America, the prose work Democratic Vistas), but here is my favorite. It could have been written yesterday:

"The great country, the greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad foil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds-where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough-a modest living-and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities."

Take that, Dick Cheney and Thomas O'Neill, Andrew Fastow and Kenny Boy!

Jack Nichols: Starting in my earliest years I began memorizing whole sections of Leaves of Grass. I've come to believe that the repetition of those viewpoints and values I discovered therein have-across the many years-worked to create in me a joyous feeling of satisfaction. Don't you think that this is what Whitman intended for his readers and lovers?

Gary Schmidgall: That point is just about the easiest one to make about Whitman. One simply need point to "A Poem of Joys" (later "A Song of Joys") from the great 1860 edition, especially that wonderful ninth line, "O the joy of my spirit! It is uncaged! It darts like lightning."

And nothing gave Whitman more pleasure than the contemplation of any human being's joy in the release of his own voice and words. That's why heroic vocalism is at the heart of his poetry. In another 1860 poem, Leaves of Grass #24, he asks the rhetorical question, "O what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices?" Then, at the end of the poem he explains about seeing those holding in their voices with pursed lips and then being struck by something that allows release:

"I see brains and lips closed — I see tympans and temples unstruck,
Until that comes which has the quality to strike and to unclose,
Until that comes which has the quality to bring forth what lies
slumbering, forever ready, in all words."

Leaves of Grass displayed this "quality" spectacularly.

Jack Nichols: What are some of the most compelling proofs that Walt Whitman lived a gay life?

Gary Schmidgall: Quite simply, his poems-with judicious corroborating assistance from shrewd reading in his surviving manuscripts and notebooks, his correspondence, and his conversations with Traubel. The poet who wrote (for a few examples):

"Extoler of amies and those that sleep in each others' arm. . ."

"Dash me with amorous wet. . . .I can repay you. . ."

"Blind loving wrestling touch! Sheathed hooded sharptoothed touch! Did it make you ache so leaving me?"

"The white teeth stay, and the boss-tooth [one of Walt's euphemisms for a cock] advances in darkness, And liquor is spilled on lips and bosoms. . ."

". . .the play of the masculine muscle through cleansetting trowsers and waistbands. . ."

"Ebb stung by the flow, and flow stung by the ebb. . . .loveflesh swelling and deliciously aching, Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous. . . .quivering jelly of love. . . white-blow and delirious juice. . ."

"Arms and hands of love-lips of love-phallic thumb of love- breasts of love-bellies, pressed and glued together with love. . ."

". . .the pulse pounding through palms and trembling encircling fingers-the young man all colored, red, ashamed, angry; The souse upon me of my lover the sea, as I lie willing and naked. . ."

I could go on, but wouldn't want to bring down the wrath of Attorney General Ashcroft. Or perhaps you are of Professor Bloom's and Professor Reynolds' mind: he was making all this eloquent sexual experience up!

Jack Nichols: Nope, I feel, just by reading what he says, he's a man of experience. I've always found it of interest that Oscar Wilde called Whitman "the herald of a new era," and said that as a man "he is the precursor of a fresh type." Is Wilde's opinion of Whitman significant to you too? And if so, why?

Gary Schmidgall: I am currently teaching an undergraduate course at Hunter College titled "Whitman and Wilde: The Art of Subversion," so this question has been much on my mind in the last several months. My biography of Whitman came just a few years after my biography of Oscar Wilde,The Stranger Wilde (Penguin-Plume), appeared.

As my research on the poet progressed, I was frequently struck by the similarities in their subversive agenda on the social, political, cultural, and sexual fronts. So striking were the similarities, in fact, that I included at the end of Walt Whitman: A Gay Life a lengthy "Annex" of more than 50 pages titled "Walt and Oscar: Voices of Liberation."

As many may not know, Wilde had a most cordial visit with Whitman in 1882 when he was on a year-long American lecture tour. The newspaper report of this visit, which relied on just what Walt decided to tell an inquiring journalist, was the first reading in my Whitman-Wilde course. I am convinced that, whether spoken or not, one important basis for their affection and shared admiration was a sense of shared "camaraderie." English homosexuals were among Whitman's most avid European supporters (they donated considerable sums of money to his support in later years), and I feel certain that Wilde read Leaves of Grass with the awareness of one of the cognoscenti.

Wilde's one published review of Whitman, which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1889 (it is where Wilde made the remark you quote), is a moving and eloquent tribute. It is included in the St. Martin's edition along with several other interesting contemporary reviews of Leaves (including a snotty put-down penned by the closeted Henry James).

Jack Nichols: Thank you, Gary, for all you've done to bring the importance of Walt Whitman to our attention. I, for one, am in your debt. I know that all of the work you've done to promote his reputation is something for which he too would be grateful. Finally, I'd like to ask what effect the great poet has had on you personally.

Gary Schmidgall: To carry a little further my Whitman-Wilde pairing, let me respond to this question too large to answer this way: my long immersion in the poet's world has served to make me agree even more fervently with this credo of Oscar Wilde, which appears in his essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism":

"Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. . . .A man is called selfish if he lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realization of his own personality. . . .Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it."

Wilde, I like to imagine, absorbed this view reading Leaves of Grass. In other words, which I will quote once more, "My gait is no faultfinder's or rejecter's gait/ I moisten the roots of all that has grown."