By Gary Schmidgall · Dutton · 464 Pages · Nonfiction

"Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch," Walt Whitman once remarked. "I stand for the sunny point of view -- stand for the joyful conclusions." Whitman's own words might be the epigraph to Gary Schmidgall's new "Gay Life" of the poet, a book so sure of its intentions, so joyfully attuned to its subject and so rewarding on every level as to seem itself like a sudden burst of sunlight in the fog.

"Give me now libidinous joys only!" Whitman wrote in his 1860 poem "Native Moments." "Give me the drench of my passions. Give me life coarse and rank!" He was at once the flower and the father of American poetry, the man who declared, in the 1855 preface to "Leaves of Grass," that America itself was "essentially the greatest poem" and that "the Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature." Whitman was also homosexual, if such a banal descriptive can be applied to a force of nature as enormous and unruly as Walt.

"I have a deeper reason than all that," he said, "the conviction that the thing is because it is, being what it is because it must be just that -- as a tree is a tree, a river a river, the sky the sky." And if a tree is a tree, as Schmidgall observes, "a gay man must be a gay man." It's as a gay man writing and reflecting on the life of another gay man that Schmidgall has produced this wonderful biography, which he structures not chronologically but through the prism of Whitman's friendships and sexual attachments. "Hitherto, scholarship has given us Whitman the Thinker," Schmidgall writes, "Whitman the Poet and Person, Whitman the Magnificent Idler, Whitman An American, Whitman the Poet of Democracy, Whitman the Prophet of a New Era," and so on and so forth. "Why should we not, by way of ameliorating the imbalance of emphasis at this late date, have something like Whitman the Gay Lover, or Pre-Stonewall Prophet, or Bather in Sex?"

Why not, indeed? You don't need a professor to tell you that the man who wrote the "Calamus" poems -- "To a Stranger," "City of Orgies," "Behold This Swarthy Face," "We Two Boys Together Clinging," to name only four -- had sex with other men in mind when he did so. Whitman was, in fact, so "bowled over by sex," in Schmidgall's phrase, that almost everything that flowed from the pen of this greatest and most American of American poets was homoerotic in nature.

"Whitman, of course," Schmidgall writes, "must have expected that his poems would be read by both idiots and savants of sex and those of every level of sophistication in between." The astonishing thing is that we've had to wait so long for a biography as judicious as this, by turns scholarly, original, beautifully written and infused with understanding. Schmidgall confesses at the outset that he is shamelessly "con amore" with his subject, and he isn't afraid to affirm that his own experience as a gay man gives him supreme authority to tell Whitman's tale. "Autobiography ... is the only real biography," Schmidgall writes. "And Walt agreed." A splendid book, and a service to American literature.

By Peter Kurth. Reprinted from Salon Aug. 21, 1997