Posthuman Imagination in the Later Poems of Walt Whitman

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D.H. Lawrence once referred to Walt Whitman as “mechanical” and “superhuman,” comparing him to a steam locomotive. He also states that matter, machines, and animals are fundamentally different from human beings. However, in the current era, when traditional binaries such as human/nature, human/animal, creature/machine, and man/woman are becoming extremely unstable, Lawrence’s insinuation, which is based on traditional humanism, no longer functions as irony. With the rapid twenty-first-century advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and information technology, it is theoretically possible for humans to merge with machines and become superhumans. In this sense, Whitman―not Lawrence―accurately predicted the social changes taking place in the present. In this essay, I discuss Whitman’s “To a Locomotive in Winter” (1876) to demonstrate how Whitman, sometimes while employing a queer gaze, adopted the steam locomotive as a tool to augment his body in his later years. This essay examines how Whitman’s experiences in the Civil War and his subsequent experiences of stroke, paralysis, and being cared for affected his queer, posthuman imagination, which extended his physical functions through the locomotive, a form of transportation technology.

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