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VIII.
LITERATURE—IDEALISTIC.
To speak of Walt Whitman at all in connection with Ulrichs and sexual inversion seems paradoxical. At the outset it must be definitely stated that he has nothing to do with anomalous, abnormal, vicious, or diseased forms of the emotion which males entertain for males. Yet no man in the modern world has expressed so strong a conviction that "manly attachment," "athletic love," "the high towering love of comrades," is a main factor in human life, a virtue upon which society will have to rest, and a passion equal in its permanence and intensity to sexual affection.
He assumes, without raising the question, that the love of man for man co-exists with the love of man for woman in one and the same individual. The relation of the two modes of feeling is clearly stated in this poem:—
"Fast-anchored, eternal, O love! O woman I love!
O bride! O wife! More resistless than I can tell, the thought of you
Then separate, as disembodied, or another born,
Ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation;
I ascend—I float in the regions of your love, O man,
O sharer of my roving life."
