(Un)constraining the body: The male body in the poetry of Edward Taylor, Walt Whitman, and Allen Ginsberg

This dissertation explores the representations of the male body in the poetry of Edward Taylor, Walt Whitman, and Allen Ginsberg. I use these representations to expose a typically patriarchal urge to universalize one's individual experience, subverting subjectivity to shared male systems of power such as Christianity and democracy.; Edward Taylor, Walt Whitman, and Allen Ginsberg are both intensely personal and political or religious poets and I suggest that the body crucial to each man's poetic mission. Each man places his body front and center in the poetry, but further examination shows that the body is more flesh. The tendency, then, is for the male poet to shape his physical experience in such a way as to mute his own flesh but further a political or religious cause.; I suggest that the poets of my work present a trajectory toward what I define as “embodied subjectivity”—the poet's ability to present his physical flesh as it appears to him. If a man is subjectivity embodied, we are able to see his flesh in vivid detail. If he is not, he has defined his body with a body of thought that mutes or silences his flesh or with a body foreign to him as a man, thus privileging a system of belief over his corporeal experience. My attention in the dissertation is on this “play” and patriarchal demands. Taylor will present the male body most antithetical to embodied subjectivity, with Whitman making strides to announce his physicality. In the end, embodied subjectivity will be most visible in the poetry of Ginsberg. Finally, use this dissertation to put my body where my mind is on this issue, urging my physicality onto the page.