https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.116
Body as a Site of Entanglement: Being and Becoming in Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
DEBOSREE MANNA
Independent Research Scholar
Abstract: Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” situates itself in the American literary canon as one of the most widely debated and philosophically radical poems. Its celebratory address to the self, the body, and its possible inferences has invited sustained critical attention from diverse literary traditions. The paper integrates insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space and imagination, and an ecocritical perspective grounded in the work of Buell and Morton to articulate the body as a site of entanglement navigating through a reciprocal becoming. The discourse on body gets problematised when it is read in tandem with these overlapping frameworks, only to further reinstate that Whitman’s corporeal poetics opens up a vicissitude of possibilities where the boundaries of the self and the other gets negotiated. The study explores how Whitman’s poem celebrates the body because it is irreducibly multiple—social and solitary, simultaneously embodied in a blade of grass and again dispersed into the immense cosmos.
Keywords: Body, Poetics, Space, Possibilities, Entanglement
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