A Tantric God

Walt Whitman's poetry presents a pervasive impression of the poet's sexual ideas. These range from his general belief in the procreative principle infusing the universe to explicit images of both heterosexual and homosexual love. Whitman was not a Christian. Nor was he Hindu or Buddhist, but apparently intuited, from Transcendentalist ideas and, possibly, references he encountered in reading, the Hindu concept of spiritual sexuality as manifested in the Tantric tradition of India. His poem "A Woman Waits for Me" clearly reveals these elements.