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Walt WhitmanHours Continuing Long
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1860A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
“Hours Continuing Long” made its first appearance as one of 12 poems that Whitman carefully copied into a notebook in the spring of 1859. He numbered them in Roman numerals, suggesting that he saw them as forming an interrelated cluster of poems, which he titled “Live Oak, with Moss,” a title taken from the second of these poems, “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing.” “Hours Continuing Long” was number VIII in the sequence. The group of poems tells the story of a love relationship between the speaker, Whitman, and an unnamed man that begins in happiness (poems I to VII) but ends in an estrangement (poem VIII). In the remaining poems, Whitman seeks consolation and hope for the future.
All these poems found their way into the “Calamus” section in the third edition of Leaves of Grass in 1860, but they were distributed throughout the 45-poem section in a way that obscured their original connection. Perhaps Whitman thought that as it stood, the sequence was too bold and too intimate in the way it presented same-sex love. He intended the “Calamus” section to celebrate male friendship, what he called “the dear love of comrades” (“I Hear it was Charged Against Me”), “adhesiveness” (“Song of the Open Road”), and “manly attachment” (“In Paths Untrodden”), notions to which no one could object (and no one did). Whitman believed in the social utility of such comradeship; it was how American democracy would be achieved, as he states in “For You, O Democracy”:
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
Regarding “Hours Continuing Long,” however, Whitman had reservations. He did not include it in in any of the six subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass that appeared during his lifetime, the ninth edition being published in 1891-1892. Perhaps he thought it showed him in a state of weakness and he preferred for others to view him in a more favorable light; no other poem in “Calamus” expresses the same kind of distress, in such personal terms, as “Hours Continuing Long.”
Historical Context
Although Whitman never made public his sexual orientation, modern commentators on the “Calamus” poems usually acknowledge that the poems focus on intimacy and love between men. However, mid- and late-19th century readers were not much concerned with this aspect of Whitman’s work. This was because Whitman’s depiction of intimate friendships between men was within the typical mode of expression for male friendships at the time, according to David S. Reynolds in his book Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (1995). Reynolds writes, “Passionate intimacy between people of the same sex was common in pre–Civil War America. The lack of clear sexual categories […] made same-sex affection unself-conscious and widespread” (p. 391). Reynolds also notes the importance during this period of “the cult of romantic friendship” (p. 391) between people of the same sex, which was considered a superior form of relationship precisely because it was not marked by sensuality, although it was also common, Reynolds states, for men and women to hug and kiss their friends of the same sex. Such forms of affection aroused no general condemnation. It was also common in hotels and inns for even strangers to sleep in the same bed, so Whitman’s reference to kissing and sleeping with a male companion did not transgress the norms of the time. What shocked readers at the time was not the “Calamus” poems but the explicit sexual imagery of some passages in Whitman’s poems. No less a figure than Ralph Waldo Emerson counseled Whitman in 1855 to delete the sexual imagery in his poems. Whitman ignored the advice, and in later decades, Emerson would again object to the sexual imagery in Leaves of Grass, which he thought could be interpreted as advocating free love.
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By Walt Whitman
