The Best Walt Whitman Quotes (You May Have Never Read) About Sex

Library of America has published a selection of Walt Whitman's final thoughts, as recorded by devoteé Horace Traubel, in a volume edited by Brenda Wineapple. Literary Hub has kindly shared a few choice moments from Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America as told to Horace Traubel, edited by Brenda Wineapple (Library of America). "Toward the end of Walt Whitman’s life," the editors explain, "the writer Horace Traubel visited him often at his home in Camden, New Jersey, and recorded their conversations on friendship, family, the Civil War, literature, and other topics, producing thousands of pages of transcripts in total. In Walt Whitman Speaks, editor Brenda Wineapple offers selections from their conversations, including these on sex." And so, from there:

Damn the expurgated books! I say damn ’em! The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book!

Sex is a red rag to most people. It takes some time to get accustomed to me, but if the folks will only persevere they will finally feel right comfortable in my presence. “Children of Adam”—the poems—are very innocent: they will not shake down a house. A man was here the other day who asked me: “Don’t you feel rather sorry on the whole that you wrote the sex poems?” I answered him by asking another question: “Don’t you feel rather sorry on the whole that I am Walt Whitman?”

All this fear of indecency, all this noise about purity and sex and the social order and the Comstockism particular and general is nasty—too nasty to make any compromise with. I never come up against it but I think of what [Heinrich] Heine said to a woman who had expressed to him some suspicion about the body. “Madame,” said Heine, “are we not all naked under our clothes?”

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We have got so in our civilization, so-called (which is no civilization at all) that we are afraid to face the body and its issues—when we shrink from the realities of our bodily life: when we refer the functions of the man and the woman, their sex, their passion, their normal necessary desires, to something which is to be kept in the dark and lied about instead of being avowed and gloried in.

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