When Symonds was introduced to the poetry of Walt Whitman by a friend, he became an immediate and devoted fan. Symonds was especially drawn to the book of Calamus. This section of The Leaves of Grass talked of adhesiveness, or the love of comrades: an idea Symonds found attractive not only because it appeared to advocate (and give a better name to) homosexuality, but because it was the modern version of the ideals of male love he had found early on in Plato’s Symposium. Symonds writes in his Walt Whitman:A Study:
No man in the modern world has expressed so strong a conviction that “manly attachment” “athletic love” “the high towering love of comrades” is a main factor in human life, a virtue upon which society will have to lay its firm foundations, and a passion equal in its permanence, superior in spirituality, to the sexual affection. Whitman regards this emotion not only as the “consolation” of the individual, but also as a new and hitherto unapprehended force for stimulating national vitality (68).
Symonds began a long correspondence with Whitman. In his letters he repeatedly asked if Whitman’s ideas about male love were of a sexual nature. Whitman finally replied that, despite whatever Symonds saw in his poetry (and what others saw as well: for while Whitman was attacked for the bodily candor of both Calamus and the section on male/female love, entitled Children of Adam, many observed that Calamus was much more passionate towards its subject), he was only sexually interested in women. This did not weaken Symonds’s admiration, nor did it stop Symonds from interpreting Whitman in the way which most appealed to him:
Whitman never suggests that comradeship may occasion the development of physical desire [between men]. On the other hand, he does not in set terms condemn desires, or warn his disciples against their perils. There is indeed a distinctly sensuous side to his conception of adhesiveness...Whitman describes an enthusiastic type of masculine emotion, leaving its private details to the moral sense and special inclination of the individuals concerned (72).
...(A)n impartial critic will...be drawn to the conclusion that what he calls the “adhesiveness” of comradeship is meant to have no interblending with the “amativeness” of sex love...still we have the right to predicate the same ground-qualities in the early Dorians, those founders of the martial institution of Greek love; and yet it is notorious to students of Greek civilization that the lofty sentiment of their masculine chivalry was intertwined with much that is repulsive to modern sentiment (74,75).
Symonds saw in the purity of love and comradeship in Whitman’s work a standard that homosexuals could possibly one day work up to:
The question now remains whether he has suggested the way whereby abnormal instincts may be moralized and raised to higher value. In other words, are those exceptional instincts provided in Calamus with the means of their salvation from the filth and mire of brutal appetite? It is difficult to answer this question; for the issue involved is nothing less momentous than the possibility of evoking a new chivalrous enthusiasm, analogous to that of primitive Hellenic society, from emotions which are at present classified among the turpitudes of human nature (76,77).
...(T)his democratic chivalry, announced by Whitman, may be destined to absorb, control, and elevate those darker, more mysterious, apparently abnormal appetites, which we know to be widely diffused and ineradicable in the ground-work of human nature(83).
Symonds wanted to be the British Whitman. He wanted to be as forward-thinking and optimistic as the American poet, to turn away from the impossible fantasy of history and towards the endless opportunities the future could potentially have in store for marginalized (albeit wealthy and privileged) men like himself; that their ‘sinful’ desires could evolve into something healthy and valuable, pure and altruistic. If it were not for Whitman stirring this excitement in Symonds, he might never have had the courage to turn to science or autobiography as a way of trying to change the world.