In short, as the assumption of the sanity of birth,
Nature and humanity, is the key to any true theory of life and the
universe--at any rate, the only theory out of which I wrote--it is,
and must inevitably be, the only key to "Leaves of Grass," and every
part of it. _That_, (and not a vain consistency or weak pride, as a
late "Springfield Republican" charges,) is the reason that I have
stood out for these particular verses uncompromisingly for over twenty
years, and maintain them to this day. _That_ is what I felt in my
inmost brain and heart, when I only answer'd Emerson's vehement
arguments with silence, under the old elms of Boston Common.
Indeed, might not every physiologist and every good physician pray
for the redeeming of this subject from its hitherto relegation to the
tongues and pens of blackguards, and boldly putting it for once at
least, if no more, in the demesne of poetry and sanity--as something
not in itself gross or impure, but entirely consistent with highest
manhood and womanhood, and indispensable to both? Might not only every
wife and every mother--not only every babe that comes into the world,
if that were possible--not only all marriage, the foundation and _sine
qua non_ of the civilized state--bless and thank the showing, or
taking for granted, that motherhood, fatherhood, sexuality, and all
that belongs to them, can be asserted, where it comes to question,
openly, joyously, proudly, "without shame or the need of shame," from
the highest artistic and human considerations--but, with reverence be
it written, on such attempt to justify the base and start of the whole
divine scheme in humanity, might not the Creative Power itself deign a
smile of approval?
To the movement for the eligibility and entrance of women amid new
spheres of business, politics, and the suffrage, the current prurient,
conventional treatment of sex is the main formidable obstacle.
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