By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘I Sing the Body Electric’ is perhaps Walt Whitman’s best-known poem, along with ‘Song of Myself’. ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ appeared in the original 1855 edition of Whitman’s collection, Leaves of Grass. It does what its title (added later) announces, with Whitman writing about his own body and its various components – but concluding that these are also part of his soul, since soul and body are one.
I Sing the Body Electric
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I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.