Off-handedly reaching to depths most of us can’t independently fathom, William Empson takes hold of an anchor upon which reading, and much of life that is more and less than reading, depends:

In literary criticism, where people are always talking about images, they have to be assumed to mean visual images; whereas the scientific use of the term includes muscular images. To imagine a movement might well be a preparation for making it; and we know that dogs dream of chasing rabbits because we see them twitch as they lie by the fire. You can imagine riding a bicycle, indeed dream of it, and you need not be seeing any picture of your own legs. I think it often makes a difference in reading poetry whether you get the muscular image, whereas it seems to be hardly ever important to get a visual image.

Athletes excel in this sort of visualization, and so, too, Empson suggests do poets and their best readers. The faculty he describes, one dimension of the imagination more broadly, might be called—and I’ll refer to it as—"the muscular imagination” or “muscular visualization.” To aid our comprehension, he quotes some lines from Keats’ “To Autumn”:

                  And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

                  Steady thy laden head across a brook.

This is a very strong piece of muscular imagery, though easily not noticed because of a negative kind. The plank over the drain will be green and slimy in autumn, so that you are liable to fall in even without a weight on your head, and the goddess has to take care not to lose her dignity. At any moment, a catastrophe will come; one storm will strip the leaves and turn all this scene to winter—that is the point of the last line ‘And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.’[1]

As an instructive example, the lines have the disadvantage of showing us what much poetry does not: a person crossing a brook. It both clarifies the principle and dodges the hard cases, such as brief poems of piercingly lucid description. Here is the twelfth way that Wallace Stevens looks at a blackbird:

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

It’s not that the muscular imagination is not employed, but it’s more difficult to specify how it operates here. We cannot simply ask: what part of the body moves? Instead, we need to feel where the body of the poem, as it were, strains, where it exerts itself: and the word “must” should immediately come into focus. This is the locus of the poem’s judgment, the modal verb implying something not about what the body of the speaker does, but about where it is, what it feels—along its very nerves. The question “what does this poem make you feel?” is in fact much more difficult to answer if we limit “feel” to emotions: the transfiguration of emotions to a fuller bodily feeling, the body participating in judgment, and judgment participating in the body, is the only way in. The critic Christopher Ricks makes frequent recourse to the verb “apprehend” because it apprehends what is not fully conceptual, the sharp edge of literature that cuts into the world where our concepts fail. The best critics (like Ricks and Empson) live along this edge, which means not explaining too much, since doing so will involve treading back from the magnificence of the view and dizzying sensation it provides. (Lesser critics over-explain; this very essay might be taken as an example of doing just that).

In another sense, Empson’s example is more apt than he acknowledges: the figure laden and steadying herself to cross the book is an exemplar of judgment-in-movement and movement-in-judgment. Whenever we move, we seek not to fall, or collide, or crash; we seek balance without stasis, activity balanced against receptivity. Here is a figure for Aristotelian judgment itself, the mean between extremes that must be risked if judgment is to operate at all.  Among the reconciliations effected by the imagination are those of feeling and judgment, body and mind, self and world, and we cannot have any of these if the muscular imagination is inert.

Most relevant for this occasion, latent within Empson’s metaphor is a common ground of metaphor upon which literature and politics can meet. Consider his example of the gleaner crossing the stream. Her body moves against gravity, it has direction, it steadies itself; it is acted upon by forces, resists them, and exerts itself. This requires, and this pattern itself constitutes, energy. Force, energy, and vectors of movement cluster together, a conceptual and metaphorical family inherent in any account or activation of the muscular imagination—and similarly inherent in any account of the world against which the muscular imagination knows itself. For the body moves within, and is receptive towards, a world that is itself a field of occasionally warring energies and forces, resistant and overcome, at odds and in harmony.

The muscular imagination brings us into contact with these when we read: when we struggle to find the “muscular image,” we are struggling to feel our way through the energies and forces represented in a text but also struggling to feel the energies and forces that are present in the language of a text. A poem, or novel, or whatever work of literature (restoring “work” to its scientific meaning), is designed so that the words are charged by, and responsive to, the warring energies and forces of life that it would—in its design—reconcile or balance; it steadies itself by registering all the forces of imbalance that lie beyond but also within itself. The heroism of a great work of literature is mythic: having the strength to subdue what is most powerful and dangerous in the world, it must also subdue those deeper impulses that afford it that strength in the first place, and yet it also must remain sensitive and responsive to them, avoiding the proud rigidity that is the hero’s downfall.  The sense of wholeness to which a work of literature aspires is a union of such energies, drives, and forces, without an effacement of them. And even when it cannot achieve such an ideal unity or wholeness, a work arranges its energies to indicate what such a unity might be, as well as what hinders their perfect reconciliation. The muscular imagination is what allows a poet or novelist to apprehend energies and unity in the act of making the poem or novel; it is also what a reader must exercise to enter and move through it.

Walt Whitman asks that we recognize that the muscular imagination of the literary imagination is coterminous with the political imagination. Both, for Whitman are focused on an appreciation of the body, the subject of political and poetic justice alike:

The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the

market,

I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down.

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,

Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire.

From the cinder-strew'd threshold I follow their movements,

The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,

Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,

They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.

.

“Each man hits his place” speaks to the rightness of the social order in the rightness of what the bodies accomplish, so that in celebrating the bodies, Whitman celebrates the nation (something like the “free labor” political ideology of the century is at work in the lines). The celebration and admiration, erotic, aesthetic and political all at once, is made possible by his feeling for himself the energy of the man’s labor, imagining the muscular work of his body by means of the work of his words, especially where that work turns on the word “play.” For the most surprising line of the poem, where the current of feeling runs most delicately and also rapidly, is the third to last: “The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms.” “Sheer” requires explanation: the sheer of a ship, being the curve of the hull, or else sheer as “the swerve” both are relevant here, with the latter rising to the top, but the thought of the men moving with the rise and fall of ships at sea helps us envision the motion. More doubtful is whether “sheer” as the translucent fabric is relevant here: it might be if we imagine the clothing, the folds of which move with the arms. But even if this is admitted, it is not allowed to linger, and we are invited instead to see how far translucent flimsiness stands from the sturdy opacity of the men. That they are “lithe” would not be impressive were they fabric; their litheness is remarkable because of their substantial bulk. The really interesting phrase, as I’ve said, is “plays even.” It is perhaps our twenty-first century ears that ask “even” to mean “surprisingly including” or “surprisingly as far as,” so that the line can be read as saying “their sheer waists play with their massive arms, somehow, this being surprising because of the massiveness of their arms.” This reading is present: it suggests admiration for the unified action of the men, a unity of form that implies the unity of a political and social order in which they stand, and for which they stand. More relevant to the line is another sense of the phrase: “plays even” could be heard as meaning “plays in even fashion with” and in this case we are asked to see that the movement of the lithe waists is equal to, even with, that of their massive arms. The “massive arms” balance the “waists” in their bulk; the movement of the one cooperates with the movement of the other. Buried deepest, but a vital root, is “plays even” as “plays fairly,” distributing work fairly, agreeing to play according to the same rules: “even” is a word of justice and equality. “Plays even” might also draw on the musical sense of “plays,” suggesting the harmony of the body, the aesthetic beauty of the labor, transforming the work not only into the pleasure of play but a visual symphony.

The aesthetic is a response to the energies of the world in concrete form, rendered simple, sensuous and passionate, and brought into a balance or reconciliation. This may happen in a natural phenomenon (ocean, mountain), or in the beauty of a human gesture, of course; in a work of art, where the premise of creation is that the work will limit itself to a set domain of elements in a particular medium that has necessarily sensory and bodily existence, the aesthetic is achieved by the contrast and equilibrium of these sensual properties. But because a work of art, as a whole, depends also on the dynamic inheritance of conventions, because it draws on the forces of an artist’s life and time, because it perhaps represents the world beyond itself, and at least testifies to its being fashioned in and from, and perhaps for, that world, the sensuous properties of the medium are never merely aesthetic, being invested with, and placed in relation to, the charges of judgments that are distinct from art.

The energy metaphor enjoins us to recognize that willing, judging, and normative thinking most broadly are dynamic movements of mind and language, and that if we do not have recourse to the language of force, motion, impact, and tension, we cannot adequately account for them; our ways of thinking about thought and bodies alike are dependent on metaphors that cluster around energy, and these are made present to us by our muscular imagination as well as our senses. In apprehending a work of art, I apprehend the energy of life that charges it, and these energies are mental as well as material, intellectual as well as corporeal. The apprehension of the energies that constitute a work of art requires a self-awareness of how those energies live along the nerves, how they move the muscles, and how the nerves sustain and are sustained by judgments of what constitutes balance, rightness, and even elegance of movement.

On the other hand, the failure of the muscular imagination, the failure to apprehend the bodily vitality of others, is, for Whitman, failure of aesthetics as well as of politics. We see this in the slave auction scene of “I Sing the Body Electric,” where the word “electric,” most obviously referring to the “body,” could also be said to refer to the singing, so that its current of energy runs through poem as well as flesh. Here is the sixth section of the poem:

A man’s body at auction,

(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)

I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.

Gentlemen look on this wonder,

Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it,

For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant,

For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.

In this head the all-baffling brain,

In it and below it the makings of heroes.

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve,

They shall be stript that you may see them.

Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,

Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized

arms and legs,

And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs blood,

The same old blood! the same red-running blood!

There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations,

(Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in parlors and

lecture-rooms?)

This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns,

In him the start of populous states and rich republics,

Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the

centuries?

(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through

the centuries?)

Not “a man at auction,” but “a man’s body at auction,” recognizing both that the body is not the man and the insistence that we recognize the irreplaceable, unfathomable value of the body that is being auctioned. The word “often” in the parentheses surprises. Why often? What thrill would this lend? What would he gain? The poem will answer the questions, but only after it struts to the side of the auctioneer and, in its mostly audacious line, “helps.” This is a rare instance of full irony from Whitman: he would help him by offering what the auctioneer lacks, a proper valuing of the body, a proper understanding of what it means. He lends his attention and his imagination to a man who is a “sloven.” The irony is effective because it recognizes two truths: on the one hand, the auctioneers in this most inhumane practice do assess bodies, do attend to their forms, and this auctioneer is slovenly for not adequately performing his role in the slave economy. On the other hand, and this is the bigger hand, the “help” that Whitman offers undermines the entire enterprise. “They shall be stript that you may see them” furthers the irony: it acknowledges that the slaves would be stripped naked for inspection on the auctioneer’s block, but it also promises a revelation of their essential humanity.

The challenge Whitman faces at the center of the poem is to describe their bodies, and to appreciate them as bodies, without falling into a language that would confirm the slave economy’s valuation of them. To further complicate the challenge, he wants to celebrate them for their strength to work, without suggesting that the strength ought to be commodified and co-opted. In one of the greatest gambles he takes in this section, Whitman includes a pastiche of the slave-auctioneer’s sales pitch—he needs, after all, to “help,” and that “help” cannot only be an assertion of human dignity (which isn’t really help at all). Taken alone the lines might be taken to be a direct quotation, their grotesque dehumanization put on display:

Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,

Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized

arms and legs,

And wonders within there yet.

This is the enslaver as connoisseur of the human body; it is an aestheticism that comes uncomfortably close to Whitman’s own terms of praise. In “life lit-eyes, pluck, volition,” vitality is praised as something that must and can be subdued, turned to useful ends. “Pliant backbone and neck” is especially damning, suggesting the burden of enforced labor, chains, and punishment, and glancing at the sought-after pliancy of spirit. “And wonders within there yet” admires the figure for its potential, for what can be removed from it, like riches from the earth.

                  But then, in the next set of lines, Whitman shifts: he does not juxtapose something against this praise, but he allows this praise to become a part of something greater, a vision of historical destiny and human dignity. He finds in the body “the making of heroes.” He cannot deny, in other words, that the muscular imagination, and even the aesthetic awareness it kindles, might be made immoral and depraved. As Christoper Ricks notes from time to time, the sadist does not lack imagination. But Whitman can show that the axis of such praise can be reoriented when set against other imaginative forces and other language. When “within there” repeats in the phrase “within there runs blood,” he resists the abstraction of “wonders” and returns instead to the flesh, to the fact of blood, common to all (“same old blood”), and by “blood” he might very well mean all bodily fluids that are “express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms,” such that they are neither spoken of nor emitted, physically. The critique is pointed in two directions; the enslaver does not know the significance of the blood in the body it prizes, and the lecture-rooms where enslavery is denounced (New England library associations) do not allow themselves to imagine the body at all. (The enslaver stops at “the muscular imagination,” whereas Whitman would go deeper still, to the “sanguinary imagination,” as it were). Continuous with the blood, and with the heart that “swells and jets” with blood, are all “all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations” that look to the future—and notice that in this sequence, “reachings” and “aspirations” return us to a bodily present, the reaching of a grasp and the aspiring that is breathing upon. “Exquisite,” “life-lit,” “pluck,” “volition,” and even “pliant” mean the same (the axis is unchanged) but are oriented now towards agency and a political future with “countless embodiments and enjoyments.” The word “enjoyments” is not an addition to embodiment but the true partner through which it is fulfilled in a “rich republic,” rich not in the monetary value placed on laboring bodies, but in what those bodies feel, the energies they enjoy.

Whitman asks: how are we to appreciate the balance of energies latent in a political system if we do not understand, with the immediacy of our senses, that political energies, like all energies, are only knowable and imaginable in so far as we have bodies? Bodily experience, for Whitman, is the measure of justice in a political order, just as it is guide to the measure and movement of a poem. All freedom is bodily freedom, even if it is not only bodily freedom, which he celebrates in the utopian vision of cosmopolitan harmony at the close of “The Sleepers”:

The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,

They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed,

Asiatic and African are hand in hand, the European and American are hand in hand,

Learn'd and unlearn'd are hand in hand, and male and female are hand in hand,

The bare arm of the girl crosses the bare breast of her lover, they press close without

lust, his lips press her neck,

The father holds his grown or ungrown son in his arms with measureless love, and

the son holds the father in his arms with measureless love

In general, Whitman is undoubtedly attuned to the attunement that is mutual sexual desire, yet in this poem, he tells us the bodily harmony is “without lust.” I was initially going to write that he goes out of his way to preclude lust from the scene, but that could only be said if we consider the fact of the phrase, rather than its place in the lines. As he writes it, there is nothing insistent, nothing defensive in the phrase: “crosses the bare breast of her lover, they press close without lust, his lips press her neck” is a natural sequence of movements, in which “press close without lust” registers as something from which the girl and her lover are disencumbered  rather than something that the poet shrinks back from. It feels, in fact, extraordinarily fearless “they press close without lust,” since they are lovers and since this last gesture is so intimate and vulnerable when it is not occasioned by erotic desire. It is not too much to imagine that Whitman imagines a post-coital embrace; if we accept this, then “without lust” is, far from embarrassed by the thought of sex, a suggestion of bodies liberated to a different intimacy on account of its intensity of pleasure. These lines set out the gamut of human bonds that, not political in themselves, a political order must recognize and honor: the solidarity and friendship of touching “hand in hand” across acknowledged difference, the perfected and transcended eroticism of lovers, and the “measureless love” of a father and son.  

And yet… against the ease, the inevitability of the line’s evolution, it differs from the others in its punctuation, broken as it is by three commas. Without disturbing the line, they register, like spikes on a seismographic, some additional force in it—additional, that is, relative to the lines before and after, each of which is divided by one comma into balanced halves, suitably for the pairing of hand and hand or father and son. It is only in the line about lovers that the commas do something strangely different, and they cannot be said to be dictated by phrasing and syntax, since a simple “and” along with adjustment of phrasing could have made the line break into two natural parts. Most obviously, we could have had the lines as follows:

The bare arm of the girl crosses the bare arm of her lover,

They press close without lust, his lips press her neck.

It is just this equanimity of placement on the page that Whitman avoids. Their embrace is the only one in this passage carried by active, dynamic verbs, the sequence “crosses,” “press close,” and “press her neck,” a sequence of increasing intimacy and proximity, with “press” shifting from intransitive to transitive. (In contrast, the lines before are carried by “are” and the following line by the active but inert “holds.”) When we consider this sequence of three verbs, we can see another possibility forgone by Whitman:

The bare arm of the girl crosses the bare arm of her lover, they press close without

lust.

Set against this, the original does not merely refuse equipoise of its halves; instead, it offers what would be a simple division, and then, in a third part goes further still, the final phrase “his lips press her neck” being the very phrase that invites us to see the potential for lust to renew itself. The wave pattern of the line is utterly distinct in the passage because it traces the wave pattern of sexual desire. Whitman wants to incorporate the erotic relationship in the calm of the passage without suggesting it is the equivalent of the other non-erotic relationships he presents. If he were to do so, he would be denying the erotic as a category of special importance, not only for him personally, but for his political vision: the harmony of political unity that Whitman envisions cannot be emblematized by lovers in the throes of passion, but it needs to recognize and accommodate erotic experience. We might say that he recognizes that to fully enter into, and participate, in the field of energy that is a democracy, the poem cannot exclude erotic experience—or we might say that to write a poem that admits into itself the energies of democratic experience, and that is a true democratic poem, it cannot exclude this experience. At the same time, whichever way we would phrase it, the poem would reconcile this experience with others that are utterly different, finding as it were, the moment of erotic union (post-coital) that shares in these other, differently physical intimate experiences of solidarity and love.

                  Whether Whitman’s novel apprehension of the body led to a novel apprehension of the body politic, or vice-versa, he finds in both a new source of energy for the language of his verse—and in the language of his verse, new possibilities for how to guide the imagination in its democratic pursuits.