...into the atmosphere. Whitman's "I" calls himself the "Partaker of influx and efflux" and declares: "Through me the afflatus surging and surging .... through me the current and index."66 Swedenborg suggested to Whitman how the erotic and the mystical were linked. Whitman told...

...Nothing escapes the pervasive view of Whitman's Poet. Not content to stoop at a keyhole, he announces: "Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" And elsewhere: "Undrape! you are not guilty to me, ... /I see through the broadcloth and gingham."...

...book did what a pilgrimage to the home could not: it opened the door and brought the poet to life. "Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" (LG 52) Whitman exclaimed in "Song of Myself," and so it was certainly for Hartley. If Traubel's book...

...Or again, with respect to the doors of tradition and their removal before "the sign of democracy": Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors...and whatever is done or said returns at last to me, And whatever I do or say I also return. I speak the password primeval. ... I give the sign of democracy;...

...No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest. Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! Such was the democratic Whitman's attitude toward structures of authority external to the sovereign...

...indirection: his vibrant catalogue of specific details, many of them intensely earthy and sexual — "Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" — leads us to a strong sense of the abstract, the idealized. Ralph Waldo Emerson put it well when...

...Myself," and immediately he juxtaposes to the idea of New York the key values of his ideal America: "Whoever degrades another degrades me. / And whatever is done or said returns at least to me. . . . / By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the...

...me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow.... II. "Song of Myself," Sec. 24, 1855: Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index. III. "To You," 1856: From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing...

...kosmos, Disorderly, fleshy and sensual . . . eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist. . . . Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!46 Time and again in each society's early capitalist history, roguish rebels emerge, boasting...

...open-door image anticipates the democratic challenge that he hurls at his readers in the long opening poem: Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! (LG 1855, Although Whitman never questioned the relations of private property and free enterprise at...