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Theme Analysis - Home In-depth analysis of "Sex" as a dominant theme in Walt Whitman's works
Throughout Whitman's life and poetry there is a sense that of homosexuality and homoeroticism, ranging from his admiration for 19th century ideals of male friendship to outright masturbatory descriptions of the male body such as in his poem "Song Of Myself". In this poem, there is in sharp contradiction to the kind of outrage that Whitman displays when he confronts about these messages, that praise chastity and denounce onanism. However, these poems reflected Whitman's true feelings towards his sex and that he merely tried to cover up his feelings and for instance, in "Once I Pass'd Through A Populous City" he changes the sex of the beloved from male to female prior to publication. He even goes far as to invent six illegitimate children to correct his public image.
During the American Civil War, the intense comradeship at the front lines in Virginia, which were visited by Whitman in his capacity as a nurse, fueled his ideas about the convergence of homosexuality and democracy.
In "Democratic Vistas", Whitman starts to discriminate between amative and adhesive love, taking cues from the pseudoscience of phrenology. Adhesive love is portrayed as a possible backbone of a better form of democracy, as a "counter-balance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy and for the spiritualization thereof".
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