Videos

American Experience: Walt Whitman

120 minutes, produced 2008 by WGBH

This program tells the life story of the American poet, Walt Whitman, from his working-class childhood in Long Island to his years as a newspaper reporter in Brooklyn, when he struggled to support his impoverished family, then to his reckless pursuit of the attention and affection he craved for his poetry, to his death in 1892 at the age of 72.

This film is not an academic biography, rather it approaches Whitman with the emotional approach of a gifted filmmaker appraising and sharing the life of America's definitive poet.

On a summer day in 1855, a 36-year-old writer emerged from an undistinguished printer's shop in Brooklyn, New York, carrying a slim volume of his poetry. He knew something of himself that his family and friends could not imagine. With his book of a dozen poems, 'Leaves of Grass', he was about to introduce America to a savior. America's Civil War was on the horizon and Walt Whitman offered up his poetry as a reflection of the America he saw; it was daring, noble, naive, brutish, sexual, frightening and flawed.

"Leaves of Grass" is considered a great work but it was reviled by many critics after Whitman self-published it in 1855. He sold only about two dozen copies, and many people took issue with his rejection of traditional rhyme and meter and his celebration of the sensuality of the human body. Even one of his supporters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, tried to get Whitman to cut some of the more erotic material

The Civil War underway, Whitman walks from New York to Virginia searching for his injured brother. Seeing the poor condition of the wounded he moved to Washington, D.C. where he acted more or less as a volunteer nurse and angel of mercy in army hospitals.

Throughout the film we hear dramatic readings of Whitman's poetry interwoven with commentaries and interviews with literary figures. Poet laureate Billy Collins says of Whitman: "Here was the first truly American poet who broke out of the form of formal poetry. "Leaves of Grass" is a poem without boundaries so that everything can flood into it -- people, professions, landscape, memories, engineering, water, children, Native Americans. There's no boundary keeping anything out."

Over time, "Leaves of Grass" grew from 12 poems in 95 pages to more than 300 poems in 400 pages.

Ted Cox writing for the Chicago Daily Herald writes: "Of course, the man who wrote, "Unscrew the locks from the doors. Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs," refuses to be confined. There's plenty of free sex, and the PBS profile does a generally admirable job of addressing Whitman's sexuality -- whether it be homosexual or bisexual or, perhaps most accurately, omnisexual - - at face value."

The filmmaker doesn't lock the film into the past, rather he unites Whitman's times and his poetry with our times, by juxtaposing photographs of Civil War casualties with film of Iraq amputees and by interweaving photography of New York City of the mid-19th century with the New York City of today to show the poet's relevance to today.

Rights: We have public performance and educational rights for this video. This video can be shown in almost every venue, but no entry fee can be charged.