Whitman's sexual themes : a historical approach

During the 1850s and 1860s the poet Walt Whitman treated sexual themes with a frequency and boldness unmatched in nineteenth-century American belles lettres. Since Whitman was extremely sensitive in his perception of the social and political issues of his day, and since he understood his poems to have a moral and social purpose, it is necessary to approach his sexual themes within the many contexts from which they arose--historical as well as biographical and textual. Recent studies in the history of sexuality enable a new determination of the place of Leaves of Grass in Victorian culture. It is thus possible and desirable to view Whitman's sexual themes in their relation to American social, intellectual, and literary history, to understand how his contemporaries understood the poems, to reevaluate the modern critical assessments of his writings and thought, and to establish new readings based on an awareness of the full historical context.

Although Whitman's concepts of sexuality changed from poem to poem and from edition to edition of Leaves of Grass, the poet most often emerges as a sexual romanticist, especially in his treatment of the themes of female sexuality, motherhood, erotic energy, comradeship, and love and death. Because of his tendency to value the liberation of individual eros from the restrictions imposed by the dominant middle-class culture, he was, moreover, a radical romanticist. But because of the nature of his sexual politics and because of his idealistic celebration of the ethic of love, it is impossible to classify him as a libertine, though a number of critics have done so.

vi Through his poetry Whitman encouraged radical uses of the sympathetic imagination in all aspects of art and life. He valued energy and flux. And he was given to Utopian visions. He was dissatisfied with the role structure of his society because it inhibited the emotional evolution of the human race as he understood it. Thus in his writing he portrayed a new Eden in which men and women enjoy between themselves a mystical physicality based on healthy sex expression, as well as a "city of robust friends" in which men overcome their self-interested materialism and give themselves to their comrades in pure sympathy. Love fortified by sexuality was for Whitman the binding force in a mobile, progressive, and productive society.