Whitman, advocating the affirmative life of the body—I want to say the luster of the body—was at the same time in an alliance with the power of transformation. Was Whitman a mystic? For myself, I cannot answer the question except to say that surely he was a religious poet in the same sense that Emerson was a religious man, for whom life itself was light. For Emerson, it was light as clear as spring in his own orchard. For Whitman, it was that hot burning, that heaviness of intent, that vertigo, that trembling: that merge. Eroticism is, both as eroticism exactly and as metaphor, what Leaves of
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