The principal motif of “Children of Adam” is that of species conti-
nuity. When the Word becomes Flesh, Hegel declares, the individual is
born, and that is the beginning of the individual “¤nitude.” And when the
individual dies that “¤nitude” ceases and he becomes part of the universal
zoe. The historian of religion Karl Kerényi makes a similar distinction
between the two concepts of mortal existence: the bios life, by which term
he refers to the individual life that terminates with death, and the zoe
life—the unbroken thread of existence that runs through the bios life of a
species but is not terminated with the death of an individual.^30 In “Chil-
dren of Adam,” the zoe-force, the agency of species continuity that con-
nects the generations, is manifested in the Adam persona by what he
calls “the semen of centuries.” This mysterious electrical essence courses
through the veins of the poems’ idealized breeder, ¤ring him with the
urge to mate with “athletic” and sexually charged women in order to cre-
ate an ideal progeny of Whitman-Adams and their athletic Eves. He
conditions himself for the ideal fatherhood needed to perpetuate the “im-
measurably long” species life and to perpetuate his soul according to the
rules propounded by the physiological and sexual reformers of the day.
After me, vista!
O, I see life is not short, but immeasurably long;
I henceforth tread the world, chaste, temperate, an early riser,
a gymnast, a steady grower,
Every hour the semen of centuries—and still of centuries.^31The Victorian novelist and essayist Samuel Butler remarked wryly that a
chicken is merely an egg’s way of creating another egg. By transmitting
“the semen of centuries,” Whitman-Adam, the heir designate of the pri-
mal Adam, becomes, in turn, the avatar and the zoe-transmitter of future
Adams. “Children of Adam” highlights Whitman’s belief that the sexual
drive coexists with the urge for spiritual transcendence, and that the two
seemingly disparate urges nurture one another. His zoe-continuity thus
becomes the instrumentality of spirit-continuity.
In the ¤rst “Children of Adam” poem (later titled “To the Garden the
World”) the Adam persona, “anew ascending” and resurrected after his
“slumber” of ¤ve thousand years by “the revolving cycles, in their wide
sweep,” reenters the garden of this world, the “quivering ¤re” of his sexu-
ality burning within him, “for reasons, most wondrous.” This image of
“So Long!” / 143