This paper examines Walt Whitman`s idea of female sexuality as it is represented in a variety of his writings including poems, newspaper articles, and essays. For Whitman, female sexuality is not an improper topic for poetry but something that should ...
This paper examines Walt Whitman`s idea of female sexuality as it is represented in a variety of his writings including poems, newspaper articles, and essays. For Whitman, female sexuality is not an improper topic for poetry but something that should be treated with openness and simplicity. In a number of his poems, Whitman illustrates an image of an ideal woman as someone who is strong, healthy, and independent with passionate sexual desire. Whitman strongly supports female sexuality because it is ultimately associated with motherhood, being capable of producing healthy offsprings that would lead the country. Hence, for him, sex is not something vulgar or something that should be discredited. Whitman, however, does not stop there in his notion of sexual politics. As a poet, he goes on to employ female sexuality as a metaphor of America as a poetic entity. America is for Whitman a woman who waits for her bridegroom to impregnate her to produce a great poem. And Whitman, the poet of free verse, becomes a new bridegroom to fulfill the woman-America-poem`s yearning for release from the house of conventional poetic form. In short, the revolutionary sexuality in Whitman`s poetry is used as a metaphor for his anxiety to turn “the bridegroom” of the old poetic form out of “the bed” of poetic creation, instilling new poetic vision into the poetic body of “the bride” to start a republic of new poetic world in American literature.