This is the only poem Whitman added to Calamus. It first appeared in the 1871 edition, placed eighth in the sequence, between “Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances” and “Recorders Ages Hence.” Although he puts his thoughts in the mouth of an old professor, they certainly reflect his own philosophy. Whitman dropped out of school at the age of twelve to go to work, but he was a prodigious reader. In his role as a newspaper editor, he read and reviewed scores of books, and, throughout his life, he read and clipped out magazine articles and essays. One of his favorite texts was Henry Hedge’s Prose Writers of Germany, first published in 1847, which offered him exposure to philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

Socrates was also a crucial model for Whitman. The middle-aged philosopher roaming the marketplace and striking up conversations with young men, seeking to rouse them into independent, critical thought, had obvious parallels for the poet. Plato’s Symposium may have been a particularly important text for Whitman in its vision of Eros leading men to truth. He may have been struck by its full-throated celebration of homosexuality and its connection to politics:

Each of us then is the mere broken tally of a man, the result of a bisection which has reduced us to a condition like that of flat fish, and each of us is perpetually in search of his corresponding tally . . .  those who are halves of a male pursue males . . . Such boys and lads are the best of their generation, because they are the most manly. Some people say that they are shameless, but they are wrong. It is not shamelessness which inspires their behavior, but high spirit and manliness and virility . . . A striking proof of this is that such boys alone, when they reach manhood, engage in public life.

But Christ is even more important than Hegel, Socrates, and Plato because, for Whitman, religion, not philosophy, is the essential mode for perceiving and ordering the cosmos.