Genesis and "Live Oak With Moss"
The first evidence of the poems that were to become the "Calamus" cluster is an unpublished manuscript sequence of twelve poems entitled "Live Oak With Moss," written in or before spring 1859. These poems were all incorporated in Whitman's 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, but out of their original sequence. These poems seem to recount the story of a relationship between the speaker of the poems and a male lover. Even in Whitman's intimate writing style, these poems, read in their original sequence, seem unusually personal and candid in their disclosure of love and disappointment, and this manuscript has become central to arguments about Whitman's homoeroticism or homosexuality. This sequence was not known in its original manuscript order until a 1953 article by Fredson Bowers.
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