The meaning of Calamus as a symbol File:AcorusCalamus.jpg Critics have generally noted that Whitman's edits tended to reduce some of his most personal and specific disclosures, possibly as an attempt to make the sequence more attractive to its wider audience. By the 1881-82 edition, the poems had been reduced to 39. The 1860 edition contains three poems that Whitman would later edit out of the sequence, including the very personal Calamus 8, "Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice me," and Calamus 9, "Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted." Whitman's constant editing of his works meant that many of the other poems would change and shift throughout the editions of his life. This attraction is presented in its political, spiritual, metaphysical, and personal phases-Whitman offering it as the backbone of future nations, the root of religious sentiments, the solution to the big questions of life, and as a source of personal anguish and joy. This sequence as written celebrates many aspects of "comradeship" or "adhesive love," Whitman's term, borrowed from phrenology to describe male same-sex attraction. In the 1860 third edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman included the twelve "Live Oak" poems along with others to form a sequence of 45 untitled numbered poems. This sequence was not known in its original manuscript order until a 1953 article by Fredson Bowers. Even in Whitman's intimate writing style, these poems, read in their original sequence, seem unusually personal and candid in their disclosure of love and disappointment, and this manuscript has become central to arguments about Whitman's homoeroticism or homosexuality.
These poems seem to recount the story of a relationship between the speaker of the poems and a male lover. These poems were all incorporated in Whitman's 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, but out of their original sequence. The first evidence of the poems that were to become the "Calamus" cluster is an unpublished manuscript sequence of twelve poems entitled "Live Oak With Moss," written in or before spring 1859.
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