Though a sincere believer in democracy, he has little sympathy for rules and laws. If all men were like unto himself, he would frankly favor anarchy. His ideal city would have neither rules nor officials.[1] And it exists already
Where the men and women think lightly of the laws.[2]
Again, he says:
I am for those that have never been master’d,
For men and women whose tempers have never been master’d,
For those whom laws, theories, conventions, can never master.[3]
IV
In Walt Whitman the age-long opposition between flesh and spirit disappears. There are those who live solely for the flesh: they are pagans, in the bad sense of the word. There are those who subject the soul to the uses of the flesh: they are the refined pagans, the skeptics, the elegant Mephistophelians. There are those who live for the spirit alone, and mortify the body: they are the ascetics, reproved by Christ as well as by the ordinary man. And there are those who respect the body and train it for the service of the soul. Such is Walt Whitman.
Can it be truly said that he sings of the body
