Whitman's Native Futurism: Frontier Erotics in the 1860 Leaves of Grass

Abstract

like a half-hid warp through the myriad and worldly of America, of friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown—not only giving tone to individual character, and making it unprecedently emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but having the deepest relations to general politics. I say democracy infers such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself.