reINspiration

Hershel Parker also deals with the twelve poems that constitute the Live Oak, with Moss sequence.  He identifies the time they originated – ‘within two years or so’ of the publication of 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. In early 1859, according Parker, Whitman copied these twelve poems in a notebook under the title Live Oak, with Moss (the title is, unlike in Helms’s article, written with comma).  The poems never got published as the sequence, and Parker too, notes that Whitman shuffled, dispersed and revised the poems and included them in the 1860 edition of Leaves. In this article, Parker, just like Helms in his article, states Fredson Bowers as the person who was the first to realize that twelve, seemingly random poems from the Calamus cluster are really the sequence telling the story of a homosexual affair. However, Parker provides more information about the publication of these findings – Bowers published these in 1953 in the Studies in Bibliograph and in Whitman’s Manuscript:’Leaves of Grass’(1860): A Parallel Text in 1955.

Parker, then, brings up the fact that from 1953/55 until 1994 when he published the sequence in the Norton Anthology of American Literature and called it ‘what today would be termed “gay manifesto”’, the sequence was generally neglected. In addition to this, Parker provides some of the probable reasons for such a neglect of this literary and culturally important material.

Firstly, he states that Studies in Bibliography is ‘highly specialized scholarly journal’ which makes it a kind of elitist journal, with not so wide readership. Also, this implies that, since it is so specialized journal it was not available to many colleges and many teachers/students. However, apart from this unavailability of the material, Parker suggests that the subject matter of the poems, such as it is, might have been a factor which contributed to the neglecting of the Live Oak, with Moss. This especially applied to the teachers, since the homoeroticism is not something generally perceived as ‘classroom safe’ topic. Finally, he offers the possibility that critics and scholars remained silent for so long about these poems because they were never published in their original form, so they were treated  as if ‘they never had a tangible existence’.

The second part of Parker’s essay is dedicated to criticism of Alan Helms’s article Whitman’s Live Oak with Moss. He sees Helms’s article was ‘the first full attempt to read the Live Oak, with Moss’. Still, he finds many of Helms’s beliefs and many of the facts he presented erroneous and attacks Helms fiercely.  Firstly, he finds it is close to sacrilege that Helms chose to provide the 1860 versions of the poems in question while talking about the Live Oak, with Moss (he even thinks that writing the title without comma is a great flaw and at several instances, calls Helms’s article the ‘no-comma Live Oak’). The Live Oak, with Moss poems printed in 1860 edition of the Leaves , according to Parker, are revised and are not identical to the original poems of the sequence and thus cannot be analyzed as the Live Oak poems, but rather as the Calamus poems. In other words, he does not so much question Helms’s interpretation, as much as he is trying to point out that it is not the interpretation resulting from the analysis of the ‘real’ Live Oak  poems but revised, Calamus poems. At one point he goes so far as to bring up the possibility that Helms might not have even read the original sequence.

To emphasize this view of his, Parker then moves on to analyze every poem and, as awful as it sounds, point to mistakes Helms made because he used ‘wrong’ versions. Consequently, he does not accept ‘homophobic oppression’ as a pervading theme of the sequence but thinks that what these poems really show ‘Whitman’s accepting of his homosexuality and surviving a thwarted love affair’.

Parker’s conclusion is, then, that the two completely different reading of the Live Oak, with Moss (or Live Oak with Mos) are the result of reading two different sets of poems. In the end, he even claims that Helms’s reading is somehow didactically wrong? because it would discourage any gay or lesbian trying to come out.

All in all, Hershel Parker’s article introduces a completely different reading of these twelve poems and provides his arguments for his reading which is all in all important because it helps us understand that the existence of different interpretations of poems is possible. Even more so in the case of Whitman who revised his poems from edition to edition which made it possible for new interpretations to emerge,  as a result of these revisions.  Parker also emphasized one crucial thing in the process of reading Whitman’s poems and that is the choice of material. He came to one conclusion reading one version of the sequence, while Helms came to different conclusion reading another version of the same sequence of poems. Meaning, then, in case of Walt Whitman is not stable; it is fluid and susceptible to change and that is a good thing, because it means that there is still some place left for new and fresh interpretations.