es of poems is something like Adam in that he is seeking new experiences, ultimate experience itself, and finds it most readily in sexual encounters. In "To the Garden the World," the poet compares the whole of the world to what he takes to be his imaginary Garden of Eden. In particular in "Children of Adam" Whitman establishes the sexual urge in all its vicissitudes as the fundamental, preeminent fact of his world, inasmuch as this urge, which seems always just below the surface, represents a kind of personal kinship with the universe. It is by means of sex, which attains the status of divinity here and there, that the poet would have all men, all Adams and Eves, discover the universe: "Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber . . . Amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous" (4, 6). The resurrection referred to may be spiritual, may be physical in the sense that the poet is waking up. But pattern of images in the body of poems in "Children of Adam" as a who
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