I sing the Body electric;
Two separate strands found in this week’s reading:
“In another e-mail sent to Japan in late summer, Monica [Lewinsky] had divulged that she had given ‘the Creep’ a ‘mushy romance’ novel titled The Notebook before he left for vacation to Martha’s Vineyard. It had been a gesture of sentiment because the president had given her a copy of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.”*
(Ken Gormley, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton v. Starr)
&
“… the letter he received in July 1861 from a complete stranger, a Connecticut woman named Susan Garnet Smith. ‘Know Walt Whitman that I am a woman! … I am not beautiful, but I love you!’ She reported having read Leaves of Grass during a country walk, while the birds and bees were making love, and she found their natural sex enacted in Whitman’s pure poetry. She made a proposition she assumed Whitman could not refuse:
Know Walt Whitman that thou has a child for me! A noble perfect manchild. I charge you my love not to give it to another woman. The world demands it! … My womb is clean and pure. It is ready for thy child my love … He must be begotten on a mountain top, in the open air. Not in lust, not in mere gratification of sensual passion, but in ennobling pure strong deep glorious passionate broad universal love. I charge you to prepare my love.
On the envelope Whitman scribbled ‘? insane asylum,’ but years later he had to agree when [biographer Horace] Traubel said the letter wasn’t crazy, ‘it’s Leaves of Grass.’”
(David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography)
