“The "Calamus" poems are a cluster of poems in Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. These poems celebrate and promote "the manly love of comrades". Most critics believe[1][2][3] that these poems are Whitman's clearest expressions in print of his ideas about homoerotic male love.

The first evidence of the poems that were to become the "Calamus" cluster is an unpublished manuscript sequence of twelve poems entitled "Live Oak With Moss," written in or before spring 1859.[4] These poems were all incorporated in Whitman's 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, but out of their original sequence. These poems seem to recount the story of a relationship between the speaker of the poems and a male lover. Even in Whitman's intimate writing style, these poems, read in their original sequence, seem unusually personal and candid in their disclosure of love and disappointment, and this manuscript has become central to arguments about Whitman's homoeroticism or homosexuality. This sequence was not known in its original manuscript order until a 1953 article by Fredson Bowers.[5]

In the 1860 third edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman included the twelve "Live Oak" poems along with others to form a sequence of 45 untitled numbered poems. This sequence as written celebrates many aspects of "comradeship" or "adhesive love," Whitman's term, borrowed from phrenology to describe male same-sex attraction.[6] This attraction is presented in its political, spiritual, metaphysical, and personal phases—Whitman offering it as the backbone of future nations, the root of religious sentiments, the solution to the big questions of life, and as a source of personal anguish and joy.”