[Footnote 6: Compare, for instance, the Preface, pp. 38, 39, with the poem
_To a Foiled Revolter or Revoltress_, p. 133.]

A few words must be added as to the indecencies scattered through Whitman's
writings. Indecencies or improprieties--or, still better, deforming
crudities--they may rightly be termed; to call them immoralities would be
going too far. Whitman finds himself, and other men and women, to be a
compound of soul and body; he finds that body plays an extremely prominent
and determining part in whatever he and other mundane dwellers have
cognisance of; he perceives this to be the necessary condition of things,
and therefore, as he fully and openly accepts it, the right condition; and
he knows of no reason why what is universally seen and known, necessary and
right, should not also be allowed and proclaimed in speech. That such a
view of the matter is entitled to a great deal of weight, and at any rate
to candid consideration and construction, appears to me not to admit of a
doubt: neither is it dubious that the contrary view, the only view which a
mealy-mouthed British nineteenth century admits as endurable, amounts to
the condemnation of nearly every great or eminent literary work of past
time, whatever the century it belongs to, the country it comes from, the
department of writing it illustrates, or the degree or sort of merit it
possesses. Tenth, second, or first century before Christ--first, eighth,
fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, or even eighteenth century
A.D.--it is still the same: no book whose subject-matter admits as possible
of an impropriety according to current notions can be depended upon to fail
of containing such impropriety,--can, if those notions are accepted as the
canon, be placed with a sense of security in the hands of girls and youths,
or read aloud to women; and this holds good just as much of severely moral
or plainly descriptive as of avowedly playful, knowing, or licentious
books. For my part, I am far from thinking that earlier state of
literature, and the public feeling from which it sprang, the wrong ones--