Treatment of Love and Sex in Walt Whitman's " Song of Myself"
This paper focuses on Walt Whitman's treatment of love and sex in his "Song of Myself." Whitman is often discussed either as a poet of body or of soul. But the fact is that there is interdependence of body and spirit in his poetry. Both are supplementary and complementary to each other in his scheme of things. Whitman denounces both the extremes the puritanic obsession with spirituality as well as immersion in carnality. Whitman while singing of the spirit does not close his eyes to the needs flesh and regards sexual urge not merely as lust but as the procreant urge of the world which perpetuates all life on this earth. He makes a powerful plea for the grant of parity to sexual love with spiritual love.