Whitman

The relationship between the human body and sexuality is a recurring motif present in much of Walt Whitman’s poetry that demonstrates his fascination with the human body and sexual experience. The human body is not only a major theme, but also a prominent conceptual device; Whitman’s utilization of body metaphors recognize that the body is the ground of human understanding to which all concepts will ultimately relate back to. The body is not only a source of pleasure, but also a source of delight; a mixture of sexual pleasure and sympathetic emotions that bind one person to another. The discussion of sexuality includes intertwining themes of “manly love” and “sexual love,” with emphasis on intense passionate attraction and interaction, along with bodily contact. Whitman goes so far to differentiate between the “amativeness” for man-woman love and “adhesiveness” for “manly love” in his dealings with sexuality. For Whitman, “sex will not be put aside; it is a great ordination of the universe” (Poetry and Prose 535). Whitman treats sex with complete openness, celebrating it as “something not in itself gross or impure, but entirely consistent with highest manhood and womanhood, and indispensable to both” (Prose Works 491-493). In his poetry, he attempts to remove “the veil” of the “forbidden voices” of sex, illuminating and transfiguring its “indecent” voices (Leaves of Grass 5). Simultaneously, Whitman’s discussion of sexuality includes an equation of the body and the soul, defining sexual experiences as spiritual. Whitman’s frank exploration of same-sex desire and relationships are represented through his in-depth exploration of human sexuality and the human body, justifying his bold assertions of same-sex attraction through the uti...

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...s spinster or perhaps a lonely married wife unfulfilled with sexual desires, who “hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window”(Leaves of Grass 60). Whitman depicts this woman as imaginatively lovemaking the bathers, who do not mind her “unseen hand” touching their bodies. The men become the object of her desire and these men “did not see her, but she saw them and loved them” (Leaves of Grass 38). Whitman describing men as an object for a women’s desire is not merely revolutionary, but also suggestive of the conventional ideology of female sexual roles. The women in Whitman’s era were not allowed to openly express their sexual desire, in some cases the ideal women were thought to have no desire at all. But in describing the woman as a lustful being, Whitman liberated the American female from the conventional Victorian ideology surrounding sexuality.