The erotic and the mystical are no strangers: each is a tempest; each drowns the individual in the yearn and success of combination; each calls us forth from an ordinary life to a new measure. For Whitman the erotic life of the body was all that the word “erotic” means, plus more; it was also its own music, its authority, and its manner of glazing our surroundings so that it seems we have been given new sight.
