poem. Leaves of Grass could not include overt references to the presum-
ably sordid sexual activities that were decried by clerics and reformers as
unnatural acts of self-pollution. The persona’s exploration of his tactile
senses roughly parallels the cycle of his auditory experiences in section 26.
He passes through a sequence of intense sexual arousals, intimations of
beauty, feelings of guilt, depression, hysteria, and near-death, and eventu-
ally attains the calm that enables him to behold visions and to prophesy.
When he exclaims during an apparent sexual spasm that “my breath is
tight in its throat,” his intense sexual feeling is once again accompanied
by the threatened loss of speech, the inability to inhale the inspirational
breath-af®atus, and intimations of death by strangulation. Like other
passages in the poems, this episode of sexual arousal, climax and an en-
suing calm is followed by visions of beauty and by a resumption of the
persona’s powers of inspired utterance.^36 His seminal release (section 29)
appears to clear his brain and to germinate “proli¤c sprouts”—visions of
golden landscapes and endless generations of loving human beings, and
it reinstates him as a godlike visionary who appears certain of his place in
an evolving universe (sections 30, 31). This sequence once again illustrates
Whitman’s principle that everything from “a leaf of grass” to “the journey-
work of the stars”—including phallic experiences—can open a window
on the wonders of the universe. In this connection it is noteworthy that
classical Greek statuary often employed representations of the phallus
and the seed to illustrate the (presumed) masculine source of eternal life.^37
In the next dozen sections of “Song of Myself ” the persona seemingly
overcomes the limitations of time, space, and causality to become fully
visionary and “absorb” his world through his senses, his imagination, and
his intuition. As though he were re-experiencing the successive cycles of
geological and animal evolution, from the primal magma to the human
present, he exclaims (in section 32), “I follow, I ascend,” thus implying
that—whether as species prototype or as poet—he is the end product, so
far, of an ongoing process. Evolutionary forces have operated through
the millennia to produce a “Walt Whitman” who is gifted with a racial
memory that enables him to replicate the evolutionary steps through
which his “embryo” has progressed. Thus he preserves, as Donald Pease
phrases it, “an impression of man’s former presence... on its way into the
human form.”^38 And the persona substantiates his claim to a sort of geo-
logical immortality by professing to discover traces, or “tokens,” of his
former selves among the (supposedly lesser) animal orders through which
“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 51