The language of drug use in Whitman's "Calamus" poems.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Papers on Language & Literature

Publication Date: 22-JUN-04

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2004 Southern Illinois University

Many studies of Walt Whitman's "Calamus" poems have explored the meaning of the calamus root. In "'Calamus': The Leaf and the Root," one of the most systematic investigations of this subject, James E. Miller argues that the root represents the corpse that nourishes the grass, "the heart, the organ from which love takes its origin," and "the phallus, ... a token of 'manly attachment'" (73-74). Russell A. Hunt complicates this last and most common interpretation when he notes that it is in fact "the blossom which has a phallic appearance," not the root. The calamus root is, he continues, "most remarkable for its odor and for its medicinal properties. Had Whitman desired an exclusively or obviously phallic object, he need not have chosen one so ambiguous or with so many other, more obvious, associations" (484-85). De-emphasizing a gendered reading, Hunt mentions the root's value as a medicine and, through this passing reference, acknowledges its ability to incite change in the body. He is silent, however, on the extent of the calamus root's power to alter physiological processes and, consequently, leaves the implications of this power for Whitman's vision of human relationships unexplored.

Doctors and pharmacists of the early 1800s were aware of the effects of ingesting calamus root. A fluid extract of the root appeared as an official preparation in the Pharmacopoeia of the United States of America as early as 1830 (General Convention 23). Throughout the century, people ingested its oil for its carminative action, or its ability to expel gas and to relieve the discomfort that is associated with bloating. The root was also used to increase appetite and to aid digestion (Grieve 726-29).

Whitman made statements to Horace Traubel indicating that he knew of the calamus root's health benefits. When Traubel informed him that J.W. Wallace, an English tourist, wanted to take a sample of calamus home as a memento from the States, Whitman replied,

Well, that is easily done--there is plenty of it here.... But you must be careful how you look it up. There's counterfeit calamus, which is only a rush--has no root. But calamus itself, the real thing, has a thick bulby root--stretches out--this way--like the fingers spread. And it is a medicinal root--you know, of course--is often brought in town by the niggers--some people boiling it even, some chewing it. It always grows in damp places, along runs of water--low lands. You can easily get it--it pulls up. Oh! Yes! You will know it by the root, which is really the only way to know it. Wallace can undoubtedly have some to take home with him. (Traubel 37-38)

As this passage demonstrates, Whitman was well acquainted with the characteristics of the calamus root--its location, appearance, and preparations. His knowledge on these subjects is matched only by his enthusiasm for them, and both seem strangely inappropriate given that he is describing a cure for flatulence. Yet, it seems that the curative aspects of the calamus root are not the true cause of Whitman's excitement: "And it is a medicinal root," he adds halfway through the paragraph, almost as an afterthought, as if there were another, more important, reason for valuing it. That reason might be the root's ability to alter the user's mental state.

In the Psychedelics Encyclopedia, Peter Stafford notes that the oils in the calamus root "contain two psychoactive substances" "which are the natural precursors to TMA-2, a compound that has ten times the potency of mescaline" (286). If taken in small quantities, calamus root does not induce hallucinations; chewing two inches or less of the root, the user feels only a slight increase in physical strength and a mild mental excitement (Stafford 286; Hoffer and Osmond 55-56). In The Hallucinogens, however, Abram Hoffer and Humphrey Osmond offer an account of a subject who experimented with longer sections of the root:

The informant and his wife, a trained psychiatric nurse, were both sophisticated subjects with hallucinogens. They had taken LSD several times in well-controlled experiments at one of our research laboratories. They had both taken 10 inches of rat root [another name for calamus root] 5 times and both agreed it produced an experience very similar to LSD. (56)

It may be impossible to prove definitively that Whitman knew of the calamus root's hallucinogenic potential and that he chose it to be a major trope in his poetic sequence based on this knowledge. Nonetheless, the sheer pleasure that he seems to get from describing the root to Traubel strongly suggests that he did. This supposition becomes even more plausible when we consider the ways in which Whitman links the calamus root in his poetry to literary representations of drugged consciousness.

Depictions of drugged consciousness were quite common in the literary productions of Whitman's contemporaries. (1) This trend was launched by Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which first appeared in 1821, sparking questions, criticism, and praise from its English audience. Thirty years later, when Ticknor and Fields, an American firm located in Boston, began publishing De Quincey's work, the Confessions became an instant success in the United States. (2) His innovative account of personal drug use exercised a powerful influence over many American writers, including Bayard Taylor and Edgar Allan Poe. (3)

But it was The Hasheesh Eater (1857), the best-seller of the twenty-one year old Fitz Hugh Ludlow, that most obviously and successfully bore the stamp of De Quincey's famous autobiography. Reviewing The Hasheesh Eater (1857), a writer for the Knickerbocker reminded his readers that since De Quincey's Confessions appeared, "many weak-minded aspirants to the fame which accrued from that successful work, have imitated the author in so far as to excite their entire thimble-full of brains with the 'smoking mud,' ... and afterward published their 'Confessions.'" Unlike there less talented followers, "[t]his 'Hasheesh-Eater,'" the reviewer assures his audience, "is of the highest order of the great 'Opium-Eater's simulators" (Hasheesh-Eater 197). Critics considered Ludlow to be the most skilled and celebrated American follower of De Quincey not because he published a description of his experiences under the influence of a mind-altering substance--something that many other writers were doing--but because he possessed a rare facility with De Quincey's language of drug use that enabled him to articulate those experiences through the expressions of his predecessor. (4) Deploying this rhetoric, Ludlow's The Hasheesh Eater exemplifies and, in this way, works toward solidifying the early- to mid-nineteenth century discourse of drugged consciousness.

Through this rhetoric of drugged consciousness, Ludlow portrays the user's simultaneous isolation and connectedness, his hypersensitivity, and his ability to form self-effacing identifications with others, subjects that are familiar to readers of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. In the post 1857 editions of Leaves, these similarities between Ludlow and Whitman may not be entirely coincidental. Christine Stansell writes that from 1859--when he began "sitting out the long period of critical silence that followed the second edition of Leaves of Grass"--to 1862--when he left for Washington--Whitman frequently visited Pfaff's restaurant, "a basement saloon in what was then central Manhattan on Broadway near Bleeker" (107). Pfaff's served as "a meeting place for journalists, critics, writers and artists" and, by the time of Whitman's visitations, "had already garnered a reputation as New York's first and only 'bohemian' night spot" (107). It was at this nightspot that Whitman met Ludlow (Dulchinos 94-95). During the time of their association, The Hasheesh Eater "was selling briskly" and Ludlow's fame was at its height (Dulchinos 90). Taking into account The Hasheesh Eater's popularity, its author's notoriety, and Pfaff's status as a social center for both Ludlow and Whitman, it is probable that Whitman read Ludlow's narrative of drug use.

Yet, the influence of the discourse of drug use on Leaves of Grass has not been adequately addressed. Commentary on the treatment of mind-altering stimuli in Whitman's work has focused primarily on Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate (1842), a pamphlet that he wrote for the temperance movement. (5) It is important to remember, however, that Americans did not begin to homogenize their perceptions of drug and alcohol experience until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "By the time prohibition became a national issue, drug use and addiction," H. Wayne Morgan writes, "seemed as dangerous to society as alcohol. To reformers they were all counterproductive, enervating, and irrational. The drive to prohibit alcohol did not cause the movement against drugs, but it helped make it seem logical and necessary" (90). Prior to this time, the public generally thought of these two intoxicants as different entities with distinct effects, and it would be anachronistic, therefore, to subsume the subject of drugs in Whitman's writings from the 1850s and 60s under the rubric of alcohol. (6)

A few critics have given drugs separate consideration. David Reynolds writes that,

Up until the 1830s, American medicine had been dominated by so-called "regular" physicians who used all kinds of heroic physical measures--emetics, cathartics, and bleeding--to combat disease. Over the next three decades, the regulars and their drugs came into wide disrepute as more "natural" forms of healing came into vogue. Regulation of diet, exercise, ventilation, temperance, and other personal habits were thought to ensure mental and physical health, while drug therapy was considered dangerous and outmoded. (332)

In agreement with many of his contemporaries, Whitman, Reynolds maintains, rejected doctors' drugs as ineffective in curing health problems and subscribed to the tenets of therapeutic thought (331-33). Echoing this claim, Robert Leigh Davis notes that Whitman "raged against the dogmatism of heroic medicine, and welcomed the turn from drugs and depletions to the healing power of nature as a crucial advance in medical practice" (13). These observations confine hashish, opiates, and other psychoactive substances to a medical context and overlook the recreational drug use, which was taking place by the middle of the nineteenth century. (7) Indeed, it is clear that Whitman strongly believed that drugs were unsuccessful and even dangerous in the treatment of physical and mental infirmities. However, his views on the legitimacy of drug use for...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.