I Sing the Body Electric

“I Sing the Body Electric” was originally an untitled poem in Walt Whitman’s self-published poetry collection Leaves of Grass in 1855. This book was controversial at the time it was written, obliging Whitman to publish the volume on his own. He also revised the book several times throughout his life, adding more pieces and changing poem titles in subsequent editions. Whitman is widely acknowledged as being the father of American poetry because of his style of unrhymed, free-verse poems and his glorification of common people. “I Sing the Body Electric” exalts the body of all people, particularly ordinary Americans who were farming, building, and creating the relatively new nation. It also glorifies the bodies of enslaved people, noting their bodies are the same as free people, thus taking an anti-slavery position. The poem is less well-known than some of Whitman’s other poems, in part because the focus on the body and homoerotic insinuations make certain critics uncomfortable, yet the title of the poem is well known—including frequent musical adaptations. Like many of Whitman’s poems, the elegant phrase of this poem’s title has made its way into popular culture.