Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions by Walt Whitman

openness about sexuality makes readers question their own body consciousness and personal taboos. “Spontaneous Me” is but one of the poems describing masturbation; “I Sing the Body Electric” includes a lengthy catalogue of all body parts-including sex organs—described with the meticulousness of a physiognomist; “Unfolded Out of the Folds” takes place at the entrance of the birth canal (also described as the “exquisite flexible doors” in “Song of Myself”); “To a Common Prostitute” honors the profession of the most marginalized of women; “[Song of Myself]” contains passages suggestive of oral sex (“Loafe with me ... ,” p. 32), voyeurism (“Twenty-eight young men ... ,” p. 38), and homoeroticism (“The boy I love ... ,” p. 86). Whitman also describes scenes of shame, as in the “wet dream” episode of “[The Sleepers]” (“Darkness you are gentler ... ,” p. 111). Whitman apparently realized that, in order to institute change regarding societal sexual hang-ups, he had to sympathize with his embarrassed readers as well as provide models for a healthy, open-minded attitude.
    Once the doors of perception were cleansed, the relationship between body and soul would be seen as it really is: connected, infinite, divine.
    Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch
or am touched from;
The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer,
This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds
(“[Song of Myself],” 1855, p. 53).
    It would be a mistake to overlook Whitman’s down-home sense of humor, tickling the edges of some of his touchiest passages (“I dote on myself,” he purrs later in the same passage. “There is that lot of me, and all so luscious”). But there is serious, deliberate provocation here. He is raising the significance and worth of the physical realm to meet that of the spiritual. Whitman was not denying the existence and importance of God, or attempting to lower the soul’s worth: He simply saw God in everyone and divinity in everything, and wanted to encourage his fellow Americans to do so, too.
    Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each
moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face
in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is
signed by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will
punctually come forever and ever
(“[Song of Myself],” 1855, p. 88).
    Simple language, complex ideas: This is Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Achieving balance between contrary notions, questioning the accepted or unquestionable, pushing every known limit or boundary-all characterize the work. And Whitman made things more difficult by sometimes modifying some of his basic tenets, such as the idea that all men are created equal: His elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom‘d” celebrates the “redeemer-president” Abraham Lincoln above all humanity, even himself. Whitman’s glorification of the physical, too, changed as his body aged. In later masterpieces, such as “Passage to India,” he finds inspiration in the amazing output of the intellect (such as the Suez Canal and the transatlantic cable crossing) rather than in the miracles of the human form. Though unconditional truisms seem to run through his oeuvre, they are often more nuanced than casual readers recognize: His interrogations in such poems as “To the States,” for example, have taught generations of radicals that one can be actively critical and still patriotic. Even his ultimate vision of America as an abstract ideal, as expressed in his aptly titled 1888 poem “America,” seems far removed from the voluptuous, fluid, fertile image of the nation in the 1855 preface.
    All these revisions and reconsiderations are signs of an active and flexible mind, one unwilling to settle or stagnate despite the appeal of worldly success and the