“We” don’t learn a single thing from Walt Whitman’s Mannahatta.
Certainly this is not of the moralizing or didactic poems, so common throughout the nineteenth and into the pre-WWI years of the twentieth century.
I wouldn’t say the poem describes Manhattan, nor would I say it describes Walt’s subjective experiences.
I don’t think Mannahatta provides clues to Walt Whitman’s purported homosexuality, (any more than anything ever in Oscar’s did). Okay, Walt appears to be uplifted by such sights as, “the manly race of drivers of horses, the brown-faced sailors,” but, Walt is also upsprang by the name Mannahatta.
Okay, Okay– Mannahatta.
Not Womannahatta, or Unisexahatta, Madhatterhatta, — but Mannahatta.
This tendency of hatred, fascism, and machismo, started by Walt Whitman, persists to this very day, in, Manhatten.
Spam of Human Affection 
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