SOURCE: “Death as Repression, Repression as Death: A Reading of Whitman's ‘Calamus Poems,’” in Walt Whitman of Mickle Street, edited by Geoffrey M. Sill, The University of Tennessee Press, 1994, pp. 179-93.
In the following essay originally published in 1989, Pollak suggests that in his “Calamus Poems,” Whitman uses “death tropes” to both deny and affirm his erotic fulfillment in the context of social and psychological oppression.
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Death in American Literature: Critical Essay by Vivian R. Pollak Access Pass.
