Whitman's "Children of Adam" The purpose of this research is to examine

The mood of Children of Adam is on the whole celebratory and exuberant. Throughout this group of poems, there is evidence of an impending shout on the part of the poet regarding his celebration of life. Specifically and repeatedly, there is a celebration of sex, or more exactly of the sexuality of humankind that ensures both the physical joy and the psychological survival of the human race. The poet's shout is by and large framed by his "singing," which may be taken to mean his decidedly naive poetic celebration of participation in the scheme of the world. This explains his protracted "singing" of what is meant to be the wondrousness of various images of the human body:

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of

In a broad sense, the poems in this group are also hortatory, inasmuch as they carry with them the poet's adjuration to the reader

. . .
ve, breasts of love, bellies press'd and glued together with love, Earth of chaste love, life that is only life after love, The body of my love, the body of the woman I love, the body of the man, the body of the earth (1215). Whitman's attitude toward sex in "Children of Adam" was nothing if not a departure from the poetic and cultural convention of his time. The courtly love that is typical of Tennyson does not seem to come at all into Whitman's consciousness; his concerns are far more direct. He is willing to suggest that chaste love is lusty love. This notion would have been an unthinkable element of poetry set in medieval timeswhatever the facts of the case behind castle doors. This may explain in large part why his reputation was strong only among the most sophisticated readers of the period and why it did not reach the mainstream until the twentieth century. Emerson was so much an admirer that, at a time when American literature had a reputation for being secondrate, he sent Leaves of Grass to British essayist Thomas Carlyle.4 Haight sums up the difference between the attitudes of Whitman's contemporaries and those of the modern period. His poetry was as revol
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 6370
Approximate Pages = 25 (250 words per page)