is poetry aroused [her] bodily, felt at once passive and active, derived from an unarguable consciousness of the vitality and beauty of the world and rested on a conviction that what [she] could feel, see, know in states of excited joy was real. The erotic was not "sex." It had nothing to do with conquest. It was a means of knowledge.(227) Even the homoerotic images of Whitman's work in such poems as "We Two Boys Together Clinging" and the "interpenetration" of "A Woman Waits for Me", suggest something more than merely a same-sex act of coitus. While they do evoke images of homosexual sex, these images concentrate more upon the relationship between the reader and writer. In the second poem mentioned, Whitman says "I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others as I and you interpenetrate now,/ I shall look for loving crops from birth, life, death, immortality, I plant so lovingly now"(87). Another "doubleness" appears here in Whitman's concept of the reader/writer relationship. The reader he feels must interpenetrate his text, while Whitman himself must penetrate the reader's mind, "plant his seed." He is invoking a sense of procreation that goes beyond the limits of homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality and builds a democracy based upon "the manly love of comrades" by expanding it beyond continental or physical borders in general. In his article, "Walt Whitman, Prophet of Gay Liberation," Richard Norton says that one of the reasons that Whitman was never accepted as the true poet of a democracy was the feeling that his proposed democracy is essentially "America's greatest embarrassment, because if what he says about democracy is true, then the American ideal of universal equality is inherently homosexual, and homosexual love is the physiological basis of democracy"(1). Yet, through the previously mentioned "universal" spirit and progressive s...
