Sue Wootton
Walt Whitman
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul”—Walt Whitman (1819-92).
Walt Whitman was a journalist and poet who volunteered as a nurse in 1863-4, during the American Civil War. His major work, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was revised and expanded over the course of nine editions during his lifetime (with a tenth edition published posthumously in 1897).
Whitman’s poetry is intensely observant of the physical world, and deeply attuned to seasonal cycles and the passage of time. Birth and death, aging, disease, injury, love and passion all appear in his work, which is renowned for its oratory style, and its celebration of the embodied nature of human experience. “I sing the body electric”, he wrote. “And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?”
The poem continues:
June Opie was twenty-three when she contracted polio on her way to England from New Zealand in 1947. She spent two years in a London hospital, where she initially had no friends or family. Against terrible odds, June recovered from full-body paralysis and learned to walk again, albeit on crutches and with both legs in callipers. Her autobiography, Over My Dead Body, was published in 1957. It became an international best-seller in just ten days.
For the past year or so I have been researching and writing the history of family caregiving. Let me say that in no way can this be a comprehensive piece of work! I have chosen to focus mainly on care of the elderly, since this reflects my professional experience as a social worker.
