e. Whitman reaches, like the Adam who was the first, innocent man on earth, for the liberation of body that is akin to the liberation of spirit and mind that may come from a poem. Indeed, throughout "Children of Adam" the poet refers to the body itself a a poem, and to the conjunction of body and poem as the ground of being which is the soul. "O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, / O I say now these are the soul!" (ll. 162 163).
The exuberance of this group of poems is frankly that of sexual delight, not to say revelry. More than this, it is the revelry of the sexual moment, that reached for and found and yet ephemeral instant of joyous explosion, both physical and psychological, that is unique to the human sexual experience. This is a naive, rather than sentimental, sexuality, a spontaneity about the sexuality that is quite opposed to the kinds of activities that would be associated with, say, a cunning seduction. To this extent, the mood of this collection of poems can be described as Dionysian, and Nietzsche's description of what that mood is can be taken as a kind of analogue for the attitude that Whitman conveys.
Thus far we have considered the Apollinian and its opposite,
the Dionysian, as artistic energies which burst forth from
nature herself, without the mediation of the human
artist energies in which nature's art impulses are
satisfied in the most immediate and direct way first in the
image world of dreams, whose completeness is not dependent
upon the intellectual attitude or the artistic culture of
any single being; and then as intoxicated reality, which
likewise does not heed the single unit, but even seeks to
destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of
The mystic feeling of oneness with the universe emerges repeatedly in this group of poems. The hero of the seri...