From Whitman’s Nationalism to Stoddard’s Expatriatism:

American writers Walt Whitman and Charles Warren Stoddard exchanged a series of letters between 1867 and 1870. These five letters have not been critically evaluated for the insight they offer into the emergence of a gay subjectivity. Once established, this insight holds the potential to contribute to a productive analysis of an under analyzed aspect of American letters - a modern gay male American aesthetic. The specificity of this subjectivity has long been elided, for between these two correspondents there are significant differences, and this variance reveals a generational difference in the expression of an American male-to-male desire, and as this difference appears, a nascent modern gay male American subjectivity can be detected.