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Themes - Home Most dominant theme: Sex as a main theme in Whitman's works
To an overall extent, literary scholars who have an interest in Walt Whitman's works are increasingly turning their attention to his sexual orientation and attitudes, insisting that he is indeed the "good, gay poet," because of the predominant theme of sex throughout his literary works.
In "Leaves of Grass" is avowedly the song of Sex and Amativeness, and even meanings that do not usually go along with those words are behind all and will duly emerge; and all are sought to be lifted into a different light and atmosphere.... Difficult as it will be, it has become, in my opinion, imperative to achieve a shifted attitude from superior men and women toward the thought and fact of sexuality, as an element in character, personality, the emotions, and a theme in literature.... The vitality of it is altogether in its relations, bearings, significance-like the clef of a symphony.
In a strategy similar to that of James Joyce, Whitman often gives clues to his method in the text itself. Here Whitman is working with Emerson's basic esthetic, showing how the precise invocation of natural facts (what is visible) that leads us inevitably to the moment of transcendence and illumination, which is really the epiphany as Emerson calls it. "But only briefly, whereupon we return again to the material level. This is an approach that I have called "transcendental materialism." In his case, Whitman will not resist the opportunity to shock the bourgeois mentality: Showing the best and dividing it from the worst, age vexes age, knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent and go bathe and admire myself.
These natural facts for their spiritual truths, the essential meanings of the sexual images come into focus. The tongue gives the heart the power of expression, allows it to be creative, bringing into existence the poet, whose highest moment is in the conception of an orgasm, the true merging of the physical and the spiritual. To lack one, is to lack the other. In that sense, sexuality is neither hetero, homo, mono, multi, incestuous nor any other simple variation. It is the symbol of the poet's creative power.
(Dowden)
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