The Use Of Sex And Animality In Walt Whitman's Poetry

After years of scrutiny and censorship, Walt Whitman described Leaves of Grass as “avowedly the song of Sex and Amativeness and even Animality” (qtd. in E. Miller). Throughout his poetry, Whitman often voiced controversial and revolutionary opinions in regards to sex, sexuality, and the human body, defying the conventional and traditional silence that surrounded those subjects during his life. Two of Whitman’s poems in particular, Song of Myself and I Sing the Body Electric, reflect these values, which have now become infamously accredited to both Walt Whitman and his poetry. Although his poetry is typically not characterized as religious, Walt Whitman’s admiration towards the human body can be interpreted as a form of worship. For Whitman,

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from; The scent of these arm-pits is an aroma finer than prayer, This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds. If I worship any particular thing it shall be some of the spread of my body.(518-530) The most prominent and controversial themes in Walt Whitman’s works is that of sex and human sexuality. Many of his poems, especially Song of Myself and The Body Electric contain imagery that is sexually explicit and, at certain times, simply erotic. The most prominent and sexual example can be seen in the fifth section of Song of Myself in with Whitman elaborately describes a sex scene between the speaker and an unknown second party. This section includes: I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning; You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart, And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet. ( 76 -

This has caused many scholars and academics to question Whitman’s sexualty. Very little is known about his love and sex life, other than the fact that it was not incredibly elaborate. However, many people view the sexual fluidity in his poems as a reflection of his real life sexual orientation. The speaker, especially in The Body Electric, appears to be unabashedly attracted to both men and women. The poem opens up with, “The bodies of men and women engirth me, and I engirth/them…” (1-2). He also writes “Man or woman! I might tell how I like you, but cannot.../ and might tell the pinnings I have...the pulse of my nights and/days” (987, 989-990). There has been countless debates as to what sexual orientation Walt Whitman would identify as.According to James Miller “Whitman was neither uniformly homosexual nor uniformly heterosexual but flexibly ‘omnisexual’...” (qtd. in Reynolds, 199). According to David S. Reynolds, “The search for details of Whitman’s private sexual activities may be doomed to failure, but his role as a far-ranging observer of the sexual mores and literature of his time is more to the point…” (