Whitman’s “To a Stranger” reflects on the idealization of love, addressing the “you” of the poem as the “he I was seeking, or she I was seeking” (line 2). The “stranger” is left ambiguous in all characteristics, including gender, as they are referenced as both a “boy” and a “girl” (line 5). The body of the “stranger” is left without any defining characteristics, as they give of their ” eyes, face, [and] flesh,” while Whitman himself gives of his “beard,” assigning himself a concrete idea of gender that clashes against the stranger’s genderlessness nature. This uncertainty is reflected in Whitman’s characterization of the pair as “fluid,” suggesting a queerness in both sexuality and gender (line 4). While unusual for the Romantic period, Whitman has “often [been] credited with inventing the language of homosexual love” with speculations of his attraction towards men (Cambridge History 330).
The ambiguity of the mysterious stranger allows for an idealization of them as a romantic partner; if Whitman and the reader know nothing of them, it leaves space for the building of unrealistic expectations. This is in line with the tradition of “ideal love” that Selinger argues for. Ideal love is the romanticized love of poetic tradition, “a mystical merger, an absolute satisfaction in which contingency and difference melt away… whether that love is with another person or with the divine” (Selinger 4). Whitman describes this “merger” as the stranger’s “body has become not [theirs] only nor left [his] body [his] only,” displaying a reverence for the forming relationship (line 6). Despite the Romantic divergence from the religious tones of the Early National period, this is reminiscent of the imagery employed by Bradstreet.
Emerson also pulls from religious imagery, subverting the god-oriented poetry of the Early National period. Rather than crediting love to the Christian god, he creates love as a religious authority, mimicking Biblical commandments in his exhortation to “give all to love; / Obey thy heart… Follow it utterly” (lines 1-2, 9). He turns the Puritan system on its head, offering an arguably stricter doctrine of love which demands “friends, kindred, days, / Estate, good-fame, / Plans, credit and the Muse” from the individual seeking romance (lines 3-5). This conception of love fully embraces the obsessive, all-consuming nature of love, elevating it as a transcendental experience. Those in love, he asserts, will have “souls above doubt, / Valor unbending” and will eventually “return / More than they were, / And ever ascending” (lines 19-20, 21-23). In contrast to Bradstreet’s conception of god’s everlasting love, Emerson argues that it is love, not religious devotion, which elevates man.
Give All To Love 