How then explain the fact that Whitman so constantly deals with the body? Here too we are in the presence of one of those contradictions, or rather, unifications, which make him in a certain sense a Hegelian poet. He sings of the body when he means to sing of the soul simply because the body, like everything else, is fundamentally a manifestation of the soul:
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul.[1]
And he asks:
If the body were not the soul, what is the soul?[2]
In this way his idealism becomes concrete, his sensualism becomes spiritualized, and the whole of life appears as a portentous unity in which nothing is to be rejected. And as he accepts life, so he accepts all the occupations of life. Even as he sings of the blossoms of the lilac, of the broad, cool sea that caresses him, of the sonorous rumblings of the drum, so he does not disdain to sing of the rough locomotive[3] or to set forth the miracles of industry in his Song of the Exposition or to write the Song for Occupations, wherein no laborer is forgotten. Does he not indeed proclaim, simply and directly: “I sing the ordinary”?
The one thing he will not accept is slavery.
