The purpose of this research is to examine the series of poems under the title "Children of Adam" by Walt Whitman. The plan of the research will be to set forth the mood of the poems in the series, and then to discuss the ways in which the theme of sexuality emerges in them. As well, the psychological and social implications for Whitman's sexuality as expressed in the poems will be explored.
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 to join in the celebration of the body, which in its glory is also the soul. This is most directly shown in "I Sing the Body Electric," which in large part catalogues the mundane, almost scientific parts of the body's anatomy and which closes with the poet's earnest declaration that this catalogue is not mere catalogue or mere science but approaches the very depths of being. To Whitman, the corrupt body is what Freud was to call the psychosexually repressed body, while the discorrupt body would have been the psychosexually liberated on...