Also, Whitman must have felt that there was no shame in the human body or the act of sex in the first place. Why should we shun a body that we were born with? Why should we disgrace an act that enables us to survive, and not only that, is one of the keys to love? Whitman says in "Song Of Myself", "I celebrate myself, and sing myself.". He was not ashamed of who he was. In fact he reveled in the beauty of himself, the beauty of the human body. For it is something that came from nature, and everything in nature is beautiful.

             Like Emerson, Whitman believed in original thought. He didn't follow the words of others, or even march to the same drummer for that matter. In "Song of Myself" he states, "You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, not take things from me, you shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself." Whitman implored his readers to take what they see from the outside, see it with their own eyes, and interpret it in their on ways. What one person sees another may not. I have always wondered if I see things physically the same way as everyone else. For instance, when I look up at the sky, especially right before the sun is setting, I see so many brilliant colors. I see red and blue and yellow and pink and purple and orange. But how do I know that I see the same colors as someone else? What if they see a totally different blue or orange than I do? The way I interpret a color is subjective to my own imagination. My purple could be someone else's pink. What Whitman is trying to convey is that not everything is concrete. A person sets his or her own personal standards of perception and boundaries of imagination. Whitman also says later on that if thoughts "are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing." Our thoughts belong to us.