ABSTRACT

In 1855 Walt Whitman wrote, “I Sing the Body Electric” (1973, p. 93). The great apologist of bodily sensuality was using the adjective electric in the sense of exciting or thrilling. Today we might say “electrifying.” But Whitman not only enthusiastically championed the body’s grandeur. He also eulogized the landscapes of the nascent technical-industrial era. Consider his celebration, in a famous poem, of the beauty of the locomotive, describing it as a “black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel” (1973, p. 471). It was an “emblem of motion and power,” which Whitman saw precisely as a corporeal symbol of modernity.