I am not thin-skinned about opposition; I need no defense, I only need to be understood. The “Leaves” do not need any excuse; they do need to be understood. If I did not understand them I would dislike them myself, God knows! 
Being misunderstood—that’s what tantalizes me. What is there I do that is not misunderstood?

Sex is the thing in my work which has been most misunderstood—that has excited the roundest opposition, the sharpest venom, the unintermitted slander, of the people who regard themselves as the custodians of the morals of the world.

There is a pretty strong enmity toward me and “Leaves of Grass,” among certain classes—not only that it is a great mess of crazy talk and hard words, all tangled up, without sense or meaning—but others sincerely think that it is a bad book, improper, and ought to be denounced and put down, and its author along with it. I have been told that in the Boston Public Library they have a copy of “Leaves of Grass,” but keep it under lock and key, afraid that it may get out and be read!

The licentiousness of the handsome Greek young men—the one for the other? I can see how “Calamus” might be opened to such an interpretation. But I can say further, that in the ten thousand who for many years now have stood ready to make any possible charge against me—to seize any pretext or suspicion—none have raised this objection.

Yet how people reel when I say father-stuff and mother-stuff and onanist and bare legs and belly! O God! You might suppose I was citing some diabolical obscenity. Some people are loading all their indecent interpretations on me—goody-goody girls and men who have been foully taught about sex, about motherhood, about the body.

The cry of indecency against “Leaves of Grass” amounts, when plainly stated, about to this: Other writers assume that the sexual relations are shameful in themselves, and not to be put in poems. But our new bard, walking right straight through all that, assumes that those very relations are the most beautiful and pure and divine of any—and in that way he celebrates them. No wonder he confounds the orthodox.
It is easy to see what “Leaves of Grass” must look like to people with such eyes. But it has always been a puzzle to me why people think that because I wrote “Children of Adam,” “Leaves of Grass,” I must perforce be interested in all the literature of rape, all the pornograph of vile minds.

We have got so in our civilization so-called, (which is no civilization at all,) that we are afraid to face the body and its issues. We shrink from the realities of our bodily life. We refer to the functions of the man and the woman, their sex, their passion, their normal necessary desires, as something which is to be kept in the dark and lied about instead of being avowed and gloried in.
Filthy to others, to me they are not filthy, but illustrious; while critics consider those subjects from the point of view of persons standing on the lowest animal and infidelistic platform. Which, then, is really the beast? Will the world ever get over its own indecencies and stop attributing them to God?

Expurgate, expurgate, expurgate! I’ve heard that till I’m deaf with it. Everybody wants to expurgate something. If you have not experienced a direct encounter with the monitors, critics, censors, you can have no idea of the venoms, jealousies, meannesses, spites, which chiefly characterize their opposition. (There are some venomous but laughable squibs occasionally in the papers. When they get off a good squib, I laugh at it, just as much as anyone.)

Damn the expurgated books! The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book. The spirit of the obscenity hunter anywhere is the spirit of the town police—the spirit that will ignore all the gigantic evils, steal a way down to the shore, pull in a lot of little naked boys there to take a bath—snake ’em in! It well pictures for me what is too commonly called the greatness and majesty of the law.

As time has passed I have got an increased horror of expurgation. An expurgation means a lot more always than it looks as if it is meant—has far-reaching consequences, like one move on the chessboard that moves so much else with it—imposes other moves. Expurgation seems just like an apology, a confession, an admission that something or other was wrong. Yes, surrender—as if I was to hide some of myself away.
I hate the idea of being put somewhere with the harm taken out of me, as good housewives alter tomcats to make them respectable. It reduces a fellow to a cipher; it’s a sort of suicide; it’s all bad, all wrong, all corrupt.

All this fear of indecency, all this noise about purity and sex is nasty—too nasty to make any compromise with. Censorship is always ignorant, always bad. Expurgation and justice do not seem to go together. To win success by false pretences—God forbid. I’d rather go to eternal ruin than climb to glory by such humbug.

I want the utmost freedom—even the utmost license—rather than any censorship. The conventional standards and laws proper enough for ordinary society apply neither to the action of the soul, nor its poets. In fact the latter know no laws but the laws of themselves, planted in them by God, and are themselves the last standards of the law, and its final exponents—responsible to Him directly, and not at all to mere etiquette.

Often the best service that can be done to the race is to lift the veil, at least for a time, from these rules and fossil-etiquettes. I’d rather have everything rotten than everything hypocritical or puritanical, if that was the alternative—as it is not. So I’d dismiss all monitors, guardians—the double-distilled villains—without any ceremony whatsoever.

That which I bring into literature for the first time, is the brawn and blood of the people, the basic animal element, virility, the pure sexuality, which is as indispensable to literature as its finer elements. The heroic animality of the “Leaves,” in pride of material splendor, in their heroic entanglements—it is before all necessary to grapple with, absorb, that quality, for it comes before all the rest.

The animal want, the eager physical hunger—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. What facts of organism and impulse I find in myself, I will have scrupulously put in my song. I, chanter of Adamic songs, offspring of my loins, offering these, offering myself, bathing myself, bathing my songs in sex—what I am determin’d to make illustrious, even if I stand sole among men. Whatever others do, let me sing these things loud and clear, and without a particle of compromise, as part of the song of democracy.

Of physiology complete, from top to toe, I sing. These “Leaves” image that physiology, not apologizing for it, but exulting openly in it. The book is like the flukes of a whale—if not graceful at least effective, never super-refined or ashamed of the animal energy that imparts power to expression.

Yes, the subjects about which such a storm has been raised are treated with unprecedented boldness and candor—but always in the very highest religious and esthetic spirit. My indecency is the ever-recurring indecency of the inspired Biblical writers—and is that of innocent youth, and of the natural and untainted man in all ages. The poems are very innocent; they will not shake down a house.

I wholly stand by “Leaves of Grass” as it is, as long as all parts and pages are construed by their own ensemble, spirit, and atmosphere. As the assumption of the sanity of birth, nature, and humanity is the key to any true theory of life and the universe—at any rate, the only theory out of which I wrote—it is, and must inevitably be, the only key to “Leaves of Grass,” and every part of it. The sanity of everything was to be the atmosphere of the poems. So the old pieces, the sexuality ones, about which the original row was started and kept up so long, must go in the same as ever.

The lines I allude to, and the spirit in which they are spoken, permeate all “Leaves of Grass”—its physiological, concrete (might almost call it, its brutal, bloody) background, base—the unitariness, the uncompromising physiology, backing, upholding, all. The work must stand or fall with them, as the human body and soul must remain as an entirety; leaving out that which many find objectionable would make it like an imperfect body.

If I had cut sex out I might just as well have cut everything out. The bulk of the pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted. The full scheme would no longer exist—it would have been violated in its most sensitive spot. When I tried to take those pieces out of the scheme the whole scheme came down about my ears. It would have been more decent to throw the book away than to mutilate it.

It takes some time to get accustomed to me, but if the folks will only persevere—read “Leaves of Grass” through with their eyes rather than through their prejudices—they will finally feel right comfortable in my presence.
Sex things will come to be more freely discussed in literature; it is inevitable. They will permeate all literature. They will force themselves upon the consciousness of the world, which has too long vilified the passions.
But the world is not ready to be thrown from the nag it has been astride these ten thousand years. It is a matter of slow growth, in which a man’s whole patience is exercised.

NEXT: THE POET AND HIS FRIENDS

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