Whitman-Adam as the successor to, and a possible reincarnation of, the
Biblical Adam was not unprecedented. A seventeenth-century Muggle-
tonian tract—reprinted in the nineteenth century—relates that a London
commoner in 1650 declared himself “to be God Almighty, and that he
was the Judge of the Quick and the Dead; and that [like the persona of
the ‘Children of Adam’ poems] he was the ¤rst Adam that was in that
innocent State, and that his Body had been Dead this Five Thousand Six
Hundred and odd Years; and now he was risen again from the Dead, And
that he was that Adam Melchisadek who met Abraham on the Way and
received Tithes of him.”^32 Although Whitman-Adam is accompanied by
his Eve in this poem, his mating urge throughout this suite of poems is
not directed at any speci¤c ®esh-and-blood woman but to a generic fe-
male mate—an amorphous sexual other. Nor does the Adam persona’s
declared sexual appetite for women necessarily re®ect that of the poet
himself who, in the words of his younger companion Peter Doyle, was
never “bothered up by a woman.” Indeed, the Adam persona’s urge to
inseminate women illustrates the antic, and strikingly sexist, eighteenth-
century notion that the semen contains a fully formed microcosmic hu-
man being that “unfolds” during pregnancy, while the ovum essentially
supplies the nutriment to nurture it.^33 In “A Woman Waits for Me” (“En-
fans d’Adam” 4) the persona, posing as “the robust husband” of legions
of impregnable women, praises “the deliciousness” of his sex drive and
anticipates “perfect men and women out of my love-spendings,” the latter
term a euphemism for the seminal discharge. He vows to engender “bully
breeds of children yet” upon generations of women who are “athletic in
their own right.” Henry C. Wright, a well-known marriage “clinician”
and reformer, explained the principle thus: “Progress, not pleasure is our
aim... the purest enjoyment is indeed designed to be experienced in
intercourse when prompted solely by love and desire for offspring.” Simi-
larly, in a ®urry of imagery the persona explains that his “madness amo-
rous” and his phallic exertions are intended to bestow, distill and infuse
entire “pent-up rivers of myself” in some undifferentiated female “you” in
order to beget the babies who, in their turn, will mature and give birth to
the sort of “perfect men and women” that America sorely needs. Al-
though Whitman would later question whether America lacked “the gift
of perfect women ¤t for thee... the mothers ¤t for thee,”^34 he fashioned
the Adam persona as a sort of deathless (“unchanged”) zoe-god, who for-
ever wanders the nation seeking eligible and willing mates in whom to
144 / “So Long!”