In honor of the “I Sing the Body Electric: Walt Whitman and the Body” exhibit (drawn from our extensive Whitman collection) on display until October 28th in the Biddle Rare Book Room, I will be writing several blog posts about Walt Whitman and his life.
Since the theme of the exhibit is the body, it might be useful to examine how scholars have discussed how Whitman wrote about the concept of the body. Here are several scholarly works that are related to this theme:
Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful by Harold Aspiz.
Whitman’s Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of Grass by Tenney Nathanson.
Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text by M. Jimmie Killingsworth.
So Long! Walt Whitman’s Poetry of Death by Harold Aspiz.
Whitman between Impressionism and Expressionism: Language of the Body, Language of the Soul by Erik Ingvar Thurin.
If you’re looking for something more general, both Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (has a chapter called “Human Body”) and The Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman (has a section called “The body” in chapter two: Historical and cultural contexts) are great resources.
To find out more about Whitman, check out the previous blog post in this series: Reading Walt Whitman.