"Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle"
About this Quote
Whitman doesn’t flatter the soul here; he upgrades the body. “Seeing, hearing, feeling” lands like a drumbeat of the senses, a deliberately plain inventory that refuses the old hierarchy where spirit is noble and flesh is suspect. The word “miracles” is the provocation: not a rare interruption of nature but the daily fact of being embodied. He’s trying to re-train the reader’s attention, to make the ordinary feel scandalously sufficient.
The line’s intent is democratic in the Whitman sense: if perception itself is miraculous, then holiness isn’t locked in churches, book learning, or inherited status. It’s distributed across the crowd and the street, available to anyone with nerve endings. That’s the subtext behind “each part and tag of me.” “Tag” sounds almost like a scrap of fabric or a label, something minor, even embarrassing. He insists even the throwaway bits count. It’s a poetic refusal of shame.
Context matters: Whitman is writing in mid-19th-century America, in the long churn of industrial modernity and political fracture, when bodies are being standardized (by factories, medicine, social codes) and also brutalized (by slavery, war, poverty). Against that machinery, he offers a radical counterclaim: the self is not a unit of labor or a moral problem to be managed, but an exuberant fact. The line works because it’s both intimate and insurgent, turning sensory life into a politics of reverence.
The line’s intent is democratic in the Whitman sense: if perception itself is miraculous, then holiness isn’t locked in churches, book learning, or inherited status. It’s distributed across the crowd and the street, available to anyone with nerve endings. That’s the subtext behind “each part and tag of me.” “Tag” sounds almost like a scrap of fabric or a label, something minor, even embarrassing. He insists even the throwaway bits count. It’s a poetic refusal of shame.
Context matters: Whitman is writing in mid-19th-century America, in the long churn of industrial modernity and political fracture, when bodies are being standardized (by factories, medicine, social codes) and also brutalized (by slavery, war, poverty). Against that machinery, he offers a radical counterclaim: the self is not a unit of labor or a moral problem to be managed, but an exuberant fact. The line works because it’s both intimate and insurgent, turning sensory life into a politics of reverence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
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