Difficult as it will be, it has become imperative to achieve a shifted attitude from superior men and women towards the thought and fact of sexuality. We have gone on for so long hurting the body that the job of rehabilitating it seems prodigious if not impossible.

Yet the body is stubborn, it craves bodily presences, it has its own peculiar tenacities—we might say aspirations as well as desires. The time will come when the whole affair of sex—copulation, reproduction—will be treated with the respect to which it is entitled. Instead of meaning shame and being apologized for it will mean purity and will be glorified.

Sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me,
For I am determin’d to tell you with courageous clear voice to prove you illustrious,
And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully equipt.
The divinity of sex, the coming together of men and women, is something not in itself gross or impure, but entirely consistent with highest manhood and highest womanhood, and indispensable to both. The muscle of the male and the teeming fibre of the female are wholesome realities, impure only by deliberate intention and effort.

What is more real than sex?
Sex is the root of it all—the animal want, the eager physical hunger,
Sex will not be put aside; it is a great ordination of the universe.
Whether you sing or make a machine, or go to the North Pole, or love your mother,
Or build a house, or black shoes, or anything—anything at all—
It’s sex, sex, sex, always immanent,
The root of roots, the life below the life,
The wish of that which, though we will not allow it to be freely spoken of, is still the basis of all that makes life worthwhile and advances the horizon of discovery;
We were all lost without redemption, except we retain the sexual fibre of things, and simplicity.

Sex contains all—
Bodies, souls, meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk.
All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves, beauties, delights of the earth,
All the governments, judges, gods, follow’d persons of the earth—
These are contain’d in sex as parts of itself and justifications of itself.

Are you to be put down to that shallow level of literature and conversation that stops a man’s recognizing the delicious pleasure of his sex, or a woman hers—the things that all existence, all souls, all realization, all decency, all health, all that is worth being here for, all of woman and of man, all beauty, all purity, all sweetness, all friendship, all strength, all life, all immortality depend on. The courageous soul may be proved by faith in sex.

I am for those who believe in loose delights,
The woman that arouses a man, the man that arouses a woman.
Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex,
Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers—
The pleasure of men with women shall never be sated, nor the pleasure of women with men.

I see the vast alembic ever working,
I see and know the flames that heat the world,
The glow, the blush, the beating hearts of lovers,
So blissful happy some,
And some so silent, dark, and nigh to death,
(You young woman, thinking of man, bashful, longing, loving, alone at night.)

O for any and each the body correlative attracting!
O for you whoever you are your correlative body!
O it, more than all else, you delighting!
O to return to paradise!

The female form approaching,
The welcome nearness, the sight of the perfect body,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot.

The male is not less the soul nor more,
He too is all qualities, he is action and power,
The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is utmost become him well,
Pride is for him.

A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking,
Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking.
Give me now libidinous joys only,
Give me the drench of my passions,
Lusty, phallic, with the potent original loins, perfectly sweet,
Bathing myself, bathing my songs in sex.

I am he that aches with amorous love,
O the pensive aching to be together! O resistless yearning!
The hungry gnaw that eats me night and day,
The irritable tide from pent-up aching rivers, that will not be at rest,
The swelling, elate and vehement, that will not be denied,
(I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride,)
I think I could dash the girder of the earth away if it lay between me and whatever I wanted.

O savage and tender achings, delicious, yet such a torment,
You know not why, and I know not why,
The love of the body of man or woman balks account,
Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,
Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

O that you and I escape from the rest and go utterly off, free and lawless,
Behavior lawless as snowflakes,
Two hawks in the air, two fishes swimming in the sea not more lawless than we.
O to be absolv’d from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and you from yours!
To escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds—
What is it to us what the rest do or think?

O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last,
Escaped from the anchorage and driving free!
To drive free! to love free!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!

O I willingly stake all for you,
O let me be lost if it must be so!
What is all else to us?
Only that we enjoy each other and exhaust each other if it must be so.
We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy,
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy!

From the night a moment I emerging flitting out,
Singing the muscular urge and the blending, singing the bedfellow’s song,
Singing the phallus, this poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all men carry,
(Know once for all, avow’d on purpose, wherever are men like me, are our lusty lurking masculine poems, the real poems—what we call poems being merely pictures,)
Singing the song of procreation, the oath of procreation I have sworn—
The great chastity of paternity, to match the great chastity of maternity—
And the illustriousness of sex, which I will celebrate,
And you act divine, and you stalwart loins,
And you children prepared for.

Those women that are warm-blooded and sufficient for me,
I see that they understand me and do not deny me,
I will be the robust husband of those women,
On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes.
I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,
I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips—
I’d rather cause the birth of one than the death of twenty!

I draw you close to me, you women, I cannot let you go,
I am for you, and you are for me, not only for our own sake, but for others’ sakes.
In you I wrap a thousand onward years,
Envelop’d in you sleep greater heroes and bards,
The drops I distil upon you shall grow fierce and athletic girls, new artists, musicians, and singers.

I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings,
Superb children and therein superb grown people,
I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others, as I and you interpenetrate now,
I shall count on the fruits of the gushing showers of them, as I count on the fruits of the gushing showers I give now,
I shall look for loving crops from the birth, life, death, immortality, I plant so lovingly now.

NEXT: THE PLEASURES OF SEX

The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman. If you want to quote from this site for something you are writing or posting, please read this first (click here).