Images of sexuality in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself

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Seminar paper from the year 1999 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0 (A), University of Münster (English Seminar), course: English and American Romantic Poetry, language: English, abstract: This research paper is going to deal with the poem Song of Myself by WaltWhitman, which was published in the collection of poetry Leaves of Grass in1855and holds a central place in American literature.Whitman himself is said to be one of the most revolutionary poets in America andbesides the most radical transcendentalist. He was a fighter for democracy andespecially stood up for the rights of oppressed and disadvantaged people.His poems were an outlet of their suppressed feelings and drives.By using free verse he also broke the conventional meter and introduced a new -more natural - verse form.Therefore I feel a personal interest in this fascinating man and his works.A common subject of many of Whitmans poems is sexuality. You can find a hugevariety of several images and symbols of sexuality in numerous poems like e.g.the famous Calamus-poems (When I heard at the Close of the Day or TrickleDrops) and also in the so-called Enfans dAdam (Children of Adam)-poems(Poem of the Body: I Sing the Body Electric ; Poem of Procreation: A Womanwaits for Me; or the most bizarre one Bunch Poem: Spontaneous Me).I have selected Song of Myself as it is widely considered to be Whitman'ssingle most important and most personal poem. In Song of Myself you can findelements of three kinds of sexuality that often appears in Whitmans poems:heterosexuality as the normal sexuality of this time, homosexuality as Whitmanis considered to be homosexual and autosexuality which was strictly considered assomething abominable and despicable at this time.Due to the huge variety of sexual elements in Song of Myself and the lenght ofthe poem it is unavoidable to give only some selected examples acting for theothers.

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