The poetic body of Song of Myself, multiple and differentiated, presented in a form which emphasizes the immediacy and autotelism of the text and the physical, mirrors Whitman's ideal of the human body. Interaction between the human body and the body of the poem occurs on three levels. The poet references bodily experience directly, invites the reader into a physical space within the text, and conceives of the body itself as a text through which the sublime may be understood.

In section 11 of Song of Myself, Whitman figures the reader bodily into the text as the hidden woman who watches the twenty-eight bathers in the lake. The woman takes the role of a readerly voyeur who watches, from a distance, and participates. Whitman asks the woman,

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you.

You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your

room.

In this passage, he uses the "you" to speak to a figure within the poem in much the same way that he has previously addressed the reader. He goes on to describe a "unseen hand" which caresses to young men but is not detected. Whitman creates a parallel between the act of watching and imaging oneself physically engaged with bodies, and the act of reading a text and becoming caught up in the action.

Dickinson presents the text as a body with significantly different aims. In Whitman's work, the sublime is within the text, accessible through the text, and open to a wide readership. Whitman speaks in a `public' voice, opening his text to the `masses' by incorporating social syntax and rhythms into his poetry. He desired his work to be widely read and published it in a variety of formats with this end in mind. Dickinson, by contrast, published few of her poems. Unlike Whitman's desire to liberate the text and rupture the boundaries of traditional form, her formal presentation -- a slant hymnal, perhaps -- stresses the impenetrability of the text and the sublime within it.

In one of Dickinson's funnier poems she writes,

288

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Are you -- Nobody -- Too?

Then there's a pair of us?

Don't tell! they'd advertise -- you know!

How dreary -- to be -- Somebody!

How public -- like a frog --

To tell one's name -- the livelong June --

To an admiring Bog!

In her actions as a poet and within the work itself, she resists the public. She preserves her status as "nobody" both to resist the banality of telling "one's name -- the livelong June--/ To an admiring Bog," and to protect herself from the ironically anonymous state which comes with being `named', public, or "Somebody".

Dickinson locates the sublime exterior to the text, and herself. She creates a walled text. She erects barriers between the self and the sublime, and between the text and the reader. . The body figured in Whitman's form is penetrable and tactile; Whitman floods the reader with sensation, establishing a physical connection between himself and the reader, between the reader and a physical sublime. Dickinson restrains the physical in her text, and presents the body "veiled". Her most frequent references to the human body focus on dead bodies, hungry bodies, or bodies that are prevented from union. I will discuss the last point in greater detail at a later point.

Dickinson's tight, distinctive form recalls the reader to the shape of the text and the concentrated voice caught between the dashes. Unlike Whitman's desire to liberate the text and rupture the boundaries of traditional form, her formal presentation -- a slant hymnal, perhaps -- stresses the impenetrability of the text and the sublime within it.

Although significantly different from Whitman's work, the body of Dickinson's poetry leads the reader back to the problem of form in a similar way. An almost anorexic obsession with the physical emerges in the form and drive of her poetry.

Both poets use the body in the text, and the text as a body, to distinct political and social ends. In the introduction to Elaine Scarry's Literature and the Body, she acknowledges the relationship between the presentation of "matter" in literature, and the political and ethical claims feminist (and Marxist) critics make on the material world (xxv). She argues that lifting "matter" into the text is a way of pointing to the permeability of the physical. A highlighting of the impingeability of the body in the text carries with it ethical and political overtones. Scarry argues that any representation of the body in text is sociolectic for this reason. Christopher Beach, however, argues that the expression of the physical is a direct link to an author's idiolectic presences in a text. He argues that the body is an expression of individual identity and that it is not "(the author's) social context that is most vividly signaled through a foregrounded interaction of body and text."(153)

Whitman's section 27 of Song of Myself and Dickinson's 398 (See Appendix A) form an interesting dialogue about the problems of the physical, the sublime, and the democratic subject. Both begin with a questioning of form. Dickinson's introspective, "I had not minded walls," joins Whitman's rebellious, "To be in any form, what is that?" While Whitman draws the reader into the text with an interrogative opening, Dickinson retains her hermetic distance with the private and almost confessional private tone. Whitman's text is inclusive; he speaks of "all of us." He engages in an active revision of the idea of form by first questioning the division between self and other.

27.

To be in any form, what is that?

(Round and round we go, all of us, and never come back thither,)

If nothing lay more develop'd the Quahaug in it's callous shell

were enough.

Mine is no callous shell,

I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,

They seize every object and led it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,

To touch my person to someone else's is about as much as I

can stand.

Whitman presents a democratic "I" who accepts the overwhelming stimuli of the world, and leads "every object" through him. He speaks of the union of self and sublime as "harmless" -- a difficult adjective to imagine in Dickinson's work. Unlike Whitman, Dickinson does not conceive of herself as "representative"[1]. She cannot lay claims on "all of us." The "happiness" which Whitman describes in section 27 supports the American sublime as a male-affirming experience of sexual desire and unity. In Whitman's fragment, the method through which the sublime enters the body is physical. "Instant conductors all over" the body lead the sensations of experience through him. He presents the body as a permeable, almost fluid, vessel through which sublimity passes. He allows access to the reader by using an "I" that accepts (not so much passive as waiting) the sexual advance of the sublime, as the reader may.

TO READ MORE ABOUT THE SUBLIME AS A SEXUAL UNION, CLICK HERE

TO READ MORE ABOUT RESISTANCE TO DEMOCRACY AND ISOLATION IN DICKINSON'S WORK, CLICK HERE

TO READ MORE ABOUT FORM, CLICK HERE

TO RETURN TO MY INTRODUCTION, CLICK HERE