Whitman's Body Electric: A Blueprint for Our Digital Soul
How a radical 19th-century poem can heal our modern discourse.
Welcome back to your Prairie Voice. We believe that just as our culture has long celebrated the sacredness of the individual body, we must now celebrate the sacredness of our collective textual body. In the forgotten letters, speeches, and stories of our past, we find an eccentric wisdom, a current of knowledge needed to ground our present and guide our future.
The Original Spark: Walt Whitman's Sacred Flesh
Our spiritual and intellectual charter comes from Walt Whitman. When he first published "I Sing the Body Electric" in his 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, he was committing a revolutionary act of seeing.
In a culture still bound by a puritanical suspicion of the flesh, Whitman's ecstatic inventory of human anatomy was a grand challenge to the idea that the soul and the body were at odds. For him, they were one and the same. He wrote,
The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account,
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.
