Resolved to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment

Calamus begins with a poem that reads like a Call for a Radical Faerie Gathering:

In paths untrodden,
In the growth by margins of pond waters,
Escaped from the life that exhibits itself,
From all the standards hitherto published -- from the pleasures, profits, conformities,
Which too long I was offering to feed my Soul;
Clear to me now, standards not yet published—clear to me that my Soul,
That the Soul of the man I speak for, feeds, rejoices only in comrades;
Here, by myself, away from the clank of the world,
Tallying and talked to here by tongues aromatic,
No longer abashed -- for in this secluded spot I can respond as I would not dare elsewhere,
Strong upon me the life that does not exhibit itself, yet contains all the rest,
Resolved to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment,
Projecting them along that substantial life,
Bequeathing, hence, types of athletic love

Afternoon, this delicious Ninth Month, in my forty-first year,
I proceed, for all who are, or have been, young men,
To tell the secret of my nights and days,
To celebrate the need of comrades.

- Walt Whitman


From White Crane