Walt Whitman Confronts Bodily Reality and Parasites in Leaves of Grass
Poet involved
What happened
Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, published in multiple editions from 1855 to 1891, broke with all literary precedent in its insistence on the equality of all aspects of the human body and the natural world — including its most humble and despised creatures. Whitman's catalogues of experience embraced insects, vermin, and the processes of bodily decay with the same democratic enthusiasm as heroic deeds and natural beauty. His famous embrace of 'the body electric' included the body's vulnerabilities and its insect companions.
Literary impact
Whitman's democratic vision of the natural world — which explicitly included insects, crawling creatures, and the bodily lowly — transformed American poetry and influenced writers worldwide from Garcia Lorca to Pablo Neruda. His refusal to exclude any creature or bodily process from literary attention cleared the way for the insect poetry and parasite verse of the twentieth century. Without Whitman's democratic expansiveness, the tradition from Burns through Lawrence to contemporary ecological poetry would have been much harder to sustain in American letters.
Source: Wikipedia
