Transcending the Body Electric

For this blog post, I am going to go beyond Walt Whitman in order to examine both the meaning of the poem “I Sing the Body Electric” and Walt’s clear influence on pop culture. The TV show The Twilight Zone, as I discovered last year, has an episode with the same title as Whitman’s poem, which is based off of Ray Bradbury’s short story. This episode presents viewers with a family who has just lost their mother and so they order a robotic grandmother to take care of them. This episode, as does Whitman’s poem, explores the ideas of body and soul and how the two are ultimately connected. Whitman writes, “O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only,/but of the soul,/O I say now these are the soul!” In the episode, although the grandmother is made up of bionic parts, I would argue that by the end of the episode where she saves the daughter’s life, the grandmother portrays a soul-like quality. Hence, even just having a body made up of all of the necessary components (as Whitman catalogues in his poem), a soul (or something like a soul) will also become present. I find that this episode of The Twilight Zone to not only be entertaining, but informative on how Whitman’s ideas are still inherently present today. The episode, although clearly fiction, does deal with a growing issue in our modern world, which is the growth of technology and the use of robots. Although Whitman clearly was not thinking about robots when writing this poem, The Twilight Zone does interestingly bring up the question of the poet’s body/soul relationship when the body itself is a complete human construction. While the theories about life Whitman preaches in his poetry may seem out dated, time and time again, we see pop culture bringing the poet back to life with new modern twists to his older but important ideas.

Watch the Twilight Zone episode here: I Sing the Body Electric