This essay is adapted from Traversal and continues the story of the making of Leaves of Grass.

With Leaves of Grass already printed — by a Brooklyn friend, at the poet’s own expense — Whitman had only to find a willing distributor who would root this uncommon book into the common soil of popular literature. He had the boldly entrepreneurial idea of approaching Fowler & Wells — New York’s preeminent publisher of phrenological and physiological books, books Whitman had reviewed while working as a journalist at The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and sold at his home bookstore.

Like astrology, like racism, phrenology promised an instant way of knowing a person’s character and predestined personality without doing the work of getting to know them or accounting for the choices they made in the course of living beyond the cards dealt them by chance. While Whitman had been making himself into a poet, the French physician, anatomist, and anthropologist Paul Broca made himself into the world’s preeminent craniologist. Soon to found the Society of Anthropology to promote his theory that brain size holds the key to intelligence and that cranial measurements would establish “the intellectual value of the various human races,” he was obsessed with the question of what determines success or failure in individuals, groups, and societies — a question he and his disciples considered the most important occupation of science. Only, their “science” was in pursuit not of understanding the world as it is but of confirming their model of the world. Armed with his craniometers and his confirmation bias, Broca set out to measure the brains of dead European geniuses and African bushwomen slight of frame, devising a hierarchy of human value — men above women, whites above Blacks, the accomplished above the unaccomplished — which he pinned without hesitation on a purely biological explanation, willfully blind to all variables of social privilege or evolutionary adaptation. His work would lay the foundation for the “racial science” that would justify eugenics — that emblem of imperialism under the guise of science, with which those in power had replaced the divine rights of kings toppled by the French and American revolutions, hijacking science for the selfsame purpose of entitled exceptionalism and self-permission for tyranny.

By the time of Broca’s death, his own brain joined the massive anatomical catalog he and his disciples had assembled, weighing in at an awkwardly average 1,484 grams, but still heftier than the 1,198-gram brain of phrenology founder Franz Joseph Gall. Whitman’s brain would not be spared, landing somewhat between the two at 1,282 grams, 52 grams more than Einstein’s.

But the strangest, most staggering thing in all of this is the instinctual reaction we so-called modern humans have to the dangerous delusions of our ancestors, as though they are fossils in the intellectual evolution of our species. This is strange and staggering because human cognitive capacity has not measurably evolved for many thousands of years, which means that the obtuse ideas of our ancestors sprang from the same brains as our indignant indictment of them. It also means that the egregious delusion with which these eminent “men of science” apprehended and classified the world sprang not from their intellectual capacity but from their cultural conditioning, which in turn means that a great many of the belief — confirmations we take for science today might render us the subject of posterity’s indignant indictments.

No one has captured this tradeoff between knowledge and certainty more poignantly than the great paleontologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould, who observed in chronicling Broca’s legacy:

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

And yet the legacy of these pseudosciences is with us, built into the mausoleum of cultural history that is our language — the phrase well rounded originated in the phrenological notion that an excellent personality is housed in a smooth, round head without bumps or the distinctive non-Euclidean cranial geometries of nonwhite races.

While there was a cautious fascination with phrenology among learned Europeans, it grew especially and widely popular in America, a country only just beginning to grow corpulent with the same hunger for shortcuts that would render it the mecca of fad diets, infomercials, and pyramid schemes. Signs for phrenological readings proliferated on the busiest sidewalks. Some employers required job applicants to submit to one. The venerable phrenologist, publisher, and proto-social-scientist Orson Fowler was almost single-handedly responsible for it all. Four years before Leaves of Grass was letterpressed into being, he had published one of the era’s most popular “science” books, Love and Parentage. “Education is something, but PARENTAGE is EVERYTHING,” he declaimed, “because it ‘DYES IN THE WOOL,’ and thereby exerts an influence on character almost infinitely more powerful than all other conditions put together.” The book would eventually go through forty editions, each selling thousands of copies and rendering him the era’s preeminent expert on deducing character from the caricature of bone.

With his reputation thus established and his royalties ensuring his solvency, Fowler could afford taking the risk of distributing a volume of an obscure poet’s strange and daring verses — verses whose unselfconscious singing of the human body, that living cosmos of physicality, resonated with Fowler’s own defiance of Victorian prudishness through physiology and his frank treatment of sex, albeit strictly hetero-normative sex.

For Whitman, phrenology promised a tangible bridge between the body and the soul — an irresistible allure for the poet who devoted his life to the struggle to reconcile materialism and spiritualism. A century before the birth of neuroscience, phrenology sought an organizing principle for the mind, just as alchemy had sought an organizing principle for matter centuries before the birth of chemistry. Whitman bowed before scientists as “the lawgivers of poets,” listing the phrenologist alongside the astronomer, the chemist, the anatomist, the geologist, the mathematician, the historian, and the lexicographer. In the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, he reverenced scientists — “of them and by them stand the visible proofs of souls” — and wrote that the work they do “underlies the structure of every perfect poem” — work that he called “their construction,” his word choice intimating just how much our understanding of reality is our own construction by the tools with which we probe it.

In an epoch when gay meant “felicitous” and queer meant “strange,” it was in the strange world of phrenology that Whitman found the language to name his own nature. Weaving its singular terminology into his verses, he took a particular interest in two terms: amativeness, defined as “reciprocal attachment and love” between the sexes, and adhesiveness, the “susceptibility to forming attachments,” particularly with persons of the same sex.

Whitman described his own character as dominated by “the emotional and liberty-loving, the social, the preponderating qualities of adhesiveness,” then exulted in a poem: “O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life!” When in love — his deepest love, a love without a possible future in the world he lived in — he cursed his “diseased, feverish, disproportionate adhesiveness” in a private notebook, then transmuted the curse into a public benediction in his poem “So Long!,” bidding farewell to the old world, blessing into being the new:

I announce justice triumphant,
I announce uncompromising liberty and equality,
I announce the justification of candor and the justification of pride.
[…]
I announce a man or woman coming, perhaps you are the one,
(So long!)
I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate,
compassionate, fully arm’d.

In “that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it),” he found the redemption of America’s failing democratic experiment — he found “the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof.” He also found a new tongue for the unnamed regions of the spirit. In the first edition of Leaves of Grass — the evolving volume that would always remain Whitman’s workbook for figuring out the universe and his own soul — he had written in “Song of Myself”:

There is that in me — I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me.
Wrench’d and sweaty . . .
I do not know it — it is without name — it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.

By the third edition, published in 1860, he was ready to write of the “pent-up aching rivers” inside him, ready to be “singing the phallus,” “singing the muscular urge and the blending,” “singing the bedfellow’s song,” the “resistless yearning,” his “love-flesh tremulous aching.” And yet he was still “seeking something yet unfound though I have diligently sought it many a long year.” The aching, the yearning, the seeking, was not for the undamming of the inner river but for the naming of it, the mapping of it across the territory of the comprehensible.

In the ninth month of his forty-first year, readying the third edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman sat down to compose what we, ahistorical in our lexicon, might consider his coming out. Titled “Calamus” after Acorus calamus — a tall wetland flowering plant native to his birthplace, Long Island, the sand-duned end of America, also known as sweet flag for its strong erect leaves and solid cylindrical spadix — this would always remain his most overtly erotic lyric sequence, the one in which he included his elegy for his New Orleans heartbreak. The sequence is often referred to as Whitman’s “homoerotic” epic — a definition narrowed not only to sexuality alone but to a sexuality that exists solely as an antipode of the heteronormative paradigm. Such a reading flattens the substance to the surface, for the “Calamus” poems are Whitman’s love poems—his only overt love poems. Among them is a short meta-poem vibrating with the vulnerability of writing these verses at all:

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

But while Whitman boldly celebrated his intimate sympathies in verse, he remained restive about them and sought to fathom himself through what he, along with his generation, thought to be science. Again and again, Whitman returned to phrenology’s amativeness and adhesiveness, charging his poetry of contrasts with this battery of words, locating his own coordinates in relation to them, making sense of the world, making sense of himself in relation to the world and of the world’s totality in relation to its multitudes. Out of the language of a pseudoscience, he sculpted a new vocabulary of elemental personal truth. In the “Calamus” poems, he dares imagine in the public plane what felt so intolerable on the personal — not only the total acceptance of his nature, but its consecration of an entire species of love:

For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-root shall,
Interchange it youths, with each other! There shall from me be a new friendship —
It shall be called after my name.

How much more poetic it would be to call ourselves Whitmanic or Waltean rather than homosexual or bisexual or queer or any other term etymologically rooted not in the lush wetlands of nature but in the strangeness, the otherness of the counternatural, describing us not by what we are but by what we are not.

Looking back on his life from his deathbed, Whitman would proclaim in one of his final poems:

I announce adhesiveness, I say it shall be limitless, unloosen’d,
I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for.