So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

implant the primal zoe-seed of ideal manhood and womanhood and of
species and personal immortality. His Adamic quest for ideal sexual part-
ners seemingly transcends generations and eras. No eligible woman ap-
pears to be safe from the lust of this mythic sexual athlete:

Death indifferent—Is it that I lived long since? Was I buried

very long ago?

For all that, I may be watching you here, this moment;

For the future, with determined will, I seek—the woman of

the future,

You, born years, centuries after me, I seek.

Throughout the “Enfans d’Adam” poems the persona’s “mystic deliria”
links his “spermatic” urge to his creative urge; and, not surprisingly, his
seminal discharge becomes a trope for his powers of utterance. Whitman
underscores this linkage in a notebook entry that declares that a new
American literature “can only be generated from the seminal freshness
and proportion of new masculine persons,” such as his idealized self.^35
Similarly, while the Adam persona is in the throes of sexual passion, he
aspires to contact the world of the spirit. Like many modern poets who
have followed his lead, Whitman portrays sexual ecstasy as a foretaste and
a possible concomitant of spiritual transcendence. The persona yearns
(whether in this life or the next):

To ascend—to leap to the heavens of love indicated to me!

To rise thither with my inebriate Soul!^36

And he thrills at the thought of being physically dead and disembodied
and yet, in some new manifestation of himself, feeling the excitement of
making passionate love to a mortal woman.

The forerunner of “Calamus,” a group of forty-¤ve intimate love poems,
was an unpublished “cluster” of a dozen love poems, collectively titled
“Live Oak, with Moss,” vaguely resembling an Elizabethan sonnet se-
quence. Whitman dispersed these verses, which have been called the
“proto-leaf” of the “Calamus” poems, throughout the published version of
the “Calamus” suite, apparently to soften or to disguise their overt homo-
sexuality.^37 The extent to which these love poems also function as poems

“So Long!” / 145