![]() ![]() It is only when the soul descends into the body, Whitman suggests, that it gains its power to operate in the world similarly, the body gains a reason to operate in the world only when it is energized by the soul. ![]() Where poets before Whitman imagined the soul as the enduring part of the self, the part that transcended the body at the body’s death, Whitman imagines a descendence (instead of a transcendence). Whitman here evokes the ancient tradition of poets imagining a conversation between the body and the soul: the difference is that instead of having the soul win the debate (as happens in virtually all the poetry before Whitman’s), the body and soul in this poem join in an ecstatic embrace and give each other identity. Continuing his insistence on equality, he affirms that neither the soul nor the body must be judged inferior to the other. And, in one of the most audacious poetic acts of the nineteenth century, he imagines his body and his soul having sex. ![]() Now, having safely placed himself apart from the mockers and arguers and talkers and trippers and askers, the poet accesses his soul. ![]()
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