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Body Politics: Walt Whitman and Soo-Young Kim's Poems

This paper compares Walt Whitman with Soo-Young Kim in view of body politics of their poetry. Although Whitman celebrates Americans' various skin colors, class, and sexual identity, his poems also reveal some dark aspects of his political unconsciousness. Despite an utopian vision, Leaves of Grass still includes unreachable limits in regard to homosexuality and feministic criticism. Unlike Whitman, Soo-Young Kim's political vision is focused on the miserable political circumstance and high opinion of Korean history. The image of 'grass' contains both sadness and hope of the depressed mass. Despite ridiculing the hypocrisy of political authority severely, he still adheres to the system of patriarchy in his own private life. While Both Whitman and Soo-Young Kim speculate the political ideal and the illusion of ideology deeply, a drive of unconsciousness and trace of desire appear through body images. That shows a bitter irony between the political vision and ambiguous sexual gestures.