Whitman and Touch: The Corporeal and Utopian Body

This paper examines how Walt Whitman’s celebration of the corporeal body explicates the experience of one’s own presence through one’s senses, especially tactile, as generated by bodily touch. It argues that this aspect of Whitman’s poetry is closely associated with Michel Foucault’s “utopian body,” a philosophical concept claiming that, ultimately, human beings can only recognize their existence through the “body.” This paper analyzes the relevant philosophical and ethical concepts implied in “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” poems in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that celebrate the corporeal body. Whitman’s thoughts and descriptions on bodily and tactile contact, especially as reflected in sections 20 and 28 of “Song of Myself,” illustrate how the poet awakens and senses corporeality in the state of “here and now.” Moreover, this aspect is emphasized by the idea of “sympathy,” namely, that such an experience, based on reciprocity, is simultaneous and ethical with the other. The electricity-related ideas of the corporeal body and contact, described as an “immediate conductor,” convey the poet’s philosophical and ethical consciousness that the experience of physical contact leads to an immediate fullness of mental and spiritual joy, thereby embodying the “utopia” of the body.