2.1

The emotional intensity of his declarations was clearly outside the purview of Western mores. Yet he felt his message natural and essential to Western society and to democracy in particular. The adhesive nature, for him, was not such as to bind two men in indissoluble or exclusive ties, but a more general thing not exactly in the promiscuous nature social binding force: comradeship as a principle something more concrete than generalized love of mankind. An idealization of uninhibited association between men; the frank admiration of virility and masculine beauty; the love of fellow workers and of strangers.

"But Whitman does not conceive of comradeship as a merely personal possession, delightful to the friends it links in bonds of amity," Symonds. writes. Rather, he feels, Whitman saw in democracy a society that would raise the ideal of manly love to the level of a social virtue, just as Feudalism, with its chivalry, had dignified and refined "the crudest of male appetites." He sees a possible end to homo-sexuality as a morbid aberration in a boldly changing society where that which has "been always waiting, latent in all men" can arise to take its natural place among human emotions.

"I will plant companionship thick as trees all along the shores of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies; I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other's necks;""