Limp Whitman and the Ecopoetics of the Neutral

Abstract:Against the common understanding of Walt Whitman as a virile prophet of ecstatic pleasure, this article explores the ecopoetics of “limp Whitman,” an iteration of the poet who surrenders and incapacitates the self not to amplify pleasure, nor to masochistically dissolve the ego, but rather to attenuate the demands he places on the earth and on his own body. In readings of “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” and “Song of the Rolling Earth” informed by Roland Barthes’s theory of the Neutral, I uncover how these poems mimic the blank expression of the earth, thus releasing it from the anthropocentric expectation that it yield pain, pleasure, or meaning. While the ecopoetics of the Neutral contests queer ecologies founded upon the worldmaking capacity of pleasure, it departs also from “antisocial” queer theory’s embrace of the death drive, offering instead limpness as a mundane yet essential image for ecology.