Walt Whitman’s secret same-sex love poems

Newly illustrated by Brian Selznick

With an afterword by Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener

As he was turning forty, Walt Whitman wrote twelve poems in a small handmade book he entitled “Live Oak, With Moss.” The poems were intensely private reflections on his attraction to and affection for other men. They were also Whitman’s most adventurous explorations of the theme of same-sex love, composed decades before the word “homosexual” came into use.

After writing “Live Oak, With Moss,” he cut up the poems, rearranged them, and hid them in the “Calamus” cluster of poems in the third edition of “Leaves of Grass.” This revolutionary, extraordinarily beautiful and passionate cluster of poems was never published by Whitman and has remained unknown to the general public—until now.