Tootfinder

Calamus 44 Here my last words
In which the poet outs himself through talking about his poetry.
It's a short piece of Whitman talking about his own writing. But he's so twisted up!
Here I shade down and hide my thoughts—I do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.
I read this as him talking about Calamus, the cluster of gay poems. And directly telling us that he's censored and hidden what he really wants to say. And yet still these poems still expose his true self. It makes me feel sad for Whitman, imagine his writing if he felt less fettered.
Still, he published some of the most clear gay poems of the 19th century. And got famous and mainstream doing it.