I Sing the Body Electric

Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass

I sing the body electric, the armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them. They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, and discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Walt Whitman first published "I Sing the Body Electric" in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, his sprawling, free-verse celebration of the human body and soul as inseparable. This opening line announces the poem's project: treating physical, bodily life as itself sacred material for song.