Unashamed, Whitman will celebrate the body, for
If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred.[2]
And with equal frankness he will describe and celebrate love:
No other words but words of love, no other thought but love.[3]
Not love as the hypocrites of literature understand it—not platonism paralleled by secret lust—but love as healthy human beings understand it, love born of body and soul alike, composed of physical action, touch, and pressure, ennobled by fatherhood and motherhood, and by the divine thought of the generations that are to spring from one embrace. He has then no cause for shame that he loves the body as well as the soul:
There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well.[4]
Nothing shall be hidden: the whole body shall be sung. His voice, at least, will sing “the song of procreation.”[5] But it is creative love that he sings, not lust:
