In Search of Walt Whitman

(waves lightly crashing) -

Walt

I celebrate myself and what I assume, you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loaf and invite my soul, I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems. (calm music) (birds chirping) -

Andrew

America's first great poet was born the last day of May in 1819 to a farming family in Huntington, Long Island. Generations of Whitmans had lived on Long Island since first settling there in 1664. Walt Whitman was born in this two-story house that his father built just nine years before. He was the second of eight children.

His father, Walt Whitman Sr., was a sullen man who drank heavily and was given to spells of depression. He was known to say- -

Walt Sr.

Keep a good heart. The worse is to come. -

Andrew

He often read political books and journals that some would call radical. Walt was closer to his mother, Louisa Whitman. She was big-boned, vigorous and an imaginative storyteller. She later recalled of her son- -

Louisa

He was a very good but very strange boy. -

Andrew

Walt's parents were very patriotic and they instilled in their children a reverence for democracy. They named three of their six sons after heroes of the new country. George Washington Whitman, Thomas Jefferson Whitman and Andrew Jackson Whitman. Walt later wrote- -

Walt

The time of my boyhood was a very restless and unhappy one. I did not know what to do. -

Andrew

But he always possessed an intimate connection with nature. This became the subject of a poem, "There Was a Child Went Forth" -

Walt

There was a child went forth every day, and the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became. And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day or for many years or stretching cycles of years. The early lilacs became part of this child and grass and white and red morning glories and white and red clover and the song of the phoebe bird and the field sprouts of April and May became part of him. Winter green sprouts and those of the light yellow corn and of the esculent roots of the garden and the apple trees covered with blossoms and the fruit afterward and wood berries and the commonest weeds by the road.

These became part of that child who went forth every day and who now goes and will always go forth every day. And these become part of him or her that peruses them here. "There Was a Child Went Forth" is less experimental, of course, than "Song of Myself" but some of the direct commentary on the mother and the father, in particular, and the lines about the upbringing and the coming into understanding about identity and difference between oneself and the objects once seasoned in the world. All of that seems to be grounded in Whitman's own biographical circumstances.

It's how the self absorbs everything around and other people are absorbing it and that's what he meant by this absorption. He and Dickinson were the first poets to write about consciousness following Emerson's. So, that's how I see it. (calm music) -

Andrew

When Walt was nearly four years old, his father moved the family to a bustling market town of 15,000 people called Brooklyn. (hammer tapping) It was booming with construction everywhere. Even so, Walt's father, a farmer and carpenter had a difficult time making ends meet. Walt spent much of his childhood moving.

On average, the Whitmans changed homes every year. One of his happiest memories was on July 4th, 1826 as the nation celebrated its 50th anniversary of independence. Francis Marquis de Lafayette came to Brooklyn. One of the great heroes of the Revolutionary War who fought side by side with George Washington, Whitman fondly recalled Lafayette's visit to Brooklyn as he rode up Fulton Street to the new library where he laid a cornerstone.

-

Walt

The childish pride I experienced in being one of those who were taken in the arms of Lafayette and reached down by him to a standing place. As a little boy, I had been pressed tightly and lovingly to the breast of Lafayette. Brooklyn only had one public school, District School Number One, which Walt attended from 1825 to 1830. But he didn't like it.

Few students did. The teachers were very strict and emphasized rote learning. Even minor infractions like failing to memorize a lesson or speaking out of turn could result in a whipping or in Whitman's words, other ingenious methods of child torture. A teacher of his recalled him as a good natured boy, sloppy in appearance, clumsy and unremarkable.

Years later, when this teacher learned that Walt had become a famous poet, he seemed surprised and remarked, "We need never be discouraged over anyone." Whatever misgivings Walt may have had, he didn't remain in school for long. His parents forced him to quit at age 11. They needed him to earn money to help the family finances. The boy who would become America's first great poet had only a grammar school education.

And what it allowed Whitman to do is to become an autodidact. He really taught himself and he took advantage of being in, what at the time, was a big city for the United States in the first half of the 19th century, a place where there were museums, a place where there were opera performances, a place where he could talk to all kinds of people and learn through apprenticeships as so many people did at the time. -

Andrew

Leaving school and needing to find a job, Walt, found work as an office boy for a law firm. He would sometimes deliver legal papers to Aaron Burr, best known as Thomas Jefferson's vice president and slaying Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Whitman remembered Burr greeting him with amused interest, alertness, smiling old eyes and hearty laugh who often gave the young boy an apple or a pear. Walt soon entered the newspaper business in the printing office of "The Long Island Star", a weekly newspaper.

In those days, political parties funded most newspapers and the Whig Party supported "The "Long Island Star". The paper served as a kind of tread school in college during his three years in which Walt learned the newspaper printing trade. When Walt was around 13, his family moved back to rural Long Island. Even though Brooklyn was expanding rapidly, his father was unable to succeed in real estate and returned to farming.

Left alone in Brooklyn must've been difficult for the teenager but he soon discovered a great passion, the theater. He loved attending the theaters across the river to see melodramas and Shakespeare. His favorite actor was Junius Brutus Booth who Walt saw in many tragic parts like "Richard III" and "Othello". -

Walt

His genius was, to me, one of the grandest revelations of my life, a lesson of artistic expression. He had much to do with shaping me in those early years. -

Andrew

He especially liked that Booth defied the rules and traditions. -

Walt

As in all art utterance, it was the subtle and powerful something special in the individual that really conquered. -

Andrew

His son, John Wilkes Booth would one day change the course of American history. It was during this time that Walt felt the first stirrings of becoming a writer. While visiting the Brooklyn waterfront- -

Walt

I saw ship under a full sail and had the desire to describe it exactly as it seemed to me. -

Andrew

Whitman completed his apprenticeship and started working as a printer in Manhattan or New York, as it was called then but his timing could not have been worse. Soon after working as a typesetter for a newspaper, a great fire destroyed much of New York's newspaper industry. 700 buildings around Wall Street were destroyed. The Great Fire of 1835, one of the worst in New York history decimated the publishing business and newspaper workers were hurt especially hard.

Many lost their jobs including Walt. He returned to Long Island. He wasn't sure what to do in this turn of events but there were two things Walt love to do, spend time with his brothers and sisters and loaf. -

Walt

I was a first rate aquatic loafer. I possessed almost unlimited capacity for floating on my back. When autumn came, Walt decided to try his hand at teaching, even though he was only 17 and was younger than some of his students. The next few years, he taught the children of local farmers reading, writing and arithmetic in towns throughout Long Island.

It was not an easy existence. The pay was poor and the country school was usually just a shack. Like many teachers of the time, Walt boarded with the families of his students, which he described as one of his best experiences and deepest lessons in human nature behind the scenes. Instead of drilling his students, he asked them thought-provoking questions, told stories and engaged them in conversation.

Throughout his life, Walt believed learning from lectures and books should never overshadow the actual experience of things. As expressed in his poem "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer". -

Walt

when I heard the learned astronomer, when the proofs, the figures were ranged in columns before me, when I was shown the charts and diagrams to add, divide and measure them. When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, how soon unaccountable I became tired and sick till the rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself in the mystical moist night air and from time to time, looked up in perfect silence at the stars. -

Andrew

Walt refused to use corporal punishment in the classroom. Later writing in an editorial for "The New York Aurora"- -

Walt

Corporal punishment never produces any good effects. Solomon's axiom, "Spare the rod and spoil the child," if meant to be taken literally, as is questionable, is a false, sanguinary principle that ought to be scouted by every man of sense. -

Andrew

However, this compassion did not endear him to many local school boards who did not understand his teaching style and often dismissed him. So that when he was living out there on his own, I think he really missed the city, I think he missed the opportunities that he had in the cities. And I think as a teacher, he, yeah, the corporal punishment he certainly wrote about that in his own journalism. He was very much against corporal punishment.

One of his most reprinted early short stories was "Child's Champion", which was about corporal punishment and about a student who dies from being beaten by a teacher. The very few reminiscences we have of Whitman as a teacher by former students are actually quite positive reminiscences about him as a teacher. Someone who loved the game of 20 questions and would play it with his students, for instance. (mellow music) -

Andrew

Turned away from teaching, Walt had an idea. Why not start his own newspaper? He found business partners who helped him purchase a printing press and rent space above a stable. At barely 19 years old, he produced his own weekly newspaper in Huntington, "The Long-Islander".

Whitman was all things. Reporter, editor, printer and delivery boy. Riding his horse Nina, delivering the papers to farms throughout the Huntington area. He later said he never had happier jaunts than riding through the countryside with Nina delivering the paper.

Amazingly, the weekly newspaper that 19-year-old Walt Whitman founded in 1838 in a room above a stable still exists today. "The Long-Islander" is a thriving local paper that serves the Long Island town of Huntington. In the following summer, however, Walt's business partner sold the paper from under him and he was a once again out of a job. He would soon set his sights on the gleaming city across the river.

(mellow piano music) In May 1841, Walt moves to New York to try his hand again at the newspaper business and fiction writing. He sets about writing a novel called "Franklin Evans or The Inebriate" It was a temperance novel about a young man from a Long Island farm who moves to New York, meets mischievous friends and succumbs to the evils of alcohol. But Whitman disavowed the work later on. -

Walt

It was damned rot. Rot of the worst sort, not insincere perhaps, but rot nevertheless. -

Andrew

Published as an extra in "The New World" newspaper, it sold 20,000 copies. Ironically, "Franklin Evans" sold more copies by far during his lifetime than anything else he ever wrote. During the next few years, Walt works briefly for "The Aurora", "Evening Tattler", "Statesman", "Democrat" and "Mirror". While most editors thought Walt had decent writing skills, they found him lazy and someone who had trouble sticking to a schedule.

One of his bosses complained- -

Boss

There is man about our office so lazy that it takes two men to open his jaws when he speaks. If you're kick him, he's too idle to cry for then he'd have to wipe his eyes. What can be done with him? -

Andrew

But Walt saw it differently. He thought was loafing was an important part of life. In one of his earliest newspaper pieces, he writes- -

Walt

How I do love a loafer! Of all human beings, none equals your genuine, inborn, unvarying loafer. Now, when I say loafer, I mean loafer, not a fellow who is lazy by fits and starts who today will work is 12 or 14 hours and tomorrow doze and idle. I stand up for no such halfway business.

Give me your calm, steady philosophic son of indolence. One that doesn't swerve from the beaten track. What was Adam, I should like to know, but a loafer. Did he do anything but loaf?

Who is foolish enough to say that Adam was a working man? (mellow piano music) -

Andrew

One of the papers while wrote for was the "Broadway Journal". One afternoon in 1845, he strolled into its offices to talk with its editor and owner who was none other than Edgar Allan Poe who had published his poem "The Raven" earlier that year. Whitman later recalled- -

Walt

Poem pressed me very favorably, was dark, quiet, handsome, southern from top to toe, languid, tired out, it is true, but altogether ingratiating. -

Andrew

Walt dressed meticulously during this period, sporting an English style suit, high hat, an elegant cane in hand. He sauntered through city streets and ports of New York, watching people at work, hearing the sounds of the city. He soaked up the impressions of Manhattan. Walt found great beauty and poetry in the every day as expressed in his poem, "I Hear America Singing".

(mellow piano music) -

Walt

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear. Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong. The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam. The mason singing his as he makes ready for work or leaves off work.

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat. The deckhand singing on the steamboat deck. The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench. The hatter singing as he stands.

The woodcutters song, the ploughboys on his way in the morning or at noon intermission or at sun down. The delicious singing of the mother or the young wife at work or of the girls sewing or washing. Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else. The day what belongs to the day, at night, the party of young fellows, robust, friendly.

singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs. (mellow music) -

Andrew

One fateful evening, Whitman attends of lecture that would alter the trajectory of his life. The renowned essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke about the future of poetry in America, proclaiming that one day, the country would bring forth a great poet. -

Ralph

The genius of poetry is here. He's in the forest walks, in paths carpeted with leaves of the chestnut, oak and pine. He visits without fear the factory, the railroad and the wharf. When he lifts his great voice, men gather to hear him and forget all that is past.

As he proceeds, I see their eyes sparkle and they are filled with cheer and new faith. -

Andrew

In the audience, Walt felt as if Emerson were addressing him personally and wondered if he could become such a poet. Constantly changing jobs in the newspaper business, Walt finally catches a break. Around the time the first real game of baseball is being played in Hoboken, New Jersey in June 1846, Walt works as an editor at "The Brooklyn Daily Eagle", it was here that he became one of the very first journalists to write about the new game of baseball. -

Walt

In our sundown perambulations of late through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing base, a certain game of ball. We wish such sites were more common among us. Let us go forth awhile and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our closed wounds in the dust and corruption and stagnant places and taste some of the good things providence has scattered around so liberally.

The game of ball is glorious. -

Andrew

As to his position at "The Brooklyn Daily Eagle". -

Walt

I had one of the pleasantest sits of my life. A good owner, good pay and easy work and hours. -

Andrew

He used some of his modest earnings to help his family purchase a house and furnishings in Brooklyn when his father gave up farming. He gave gifts to his family, sewing supplies and jewelry for his mother and sisters, boots for his brothers. Whatever his faults may have been, Walt proved to be an exceptionally generous person throughout his life. Working at "The Daily Eagle", he marveled at how "The Telegraph", which Samuel F.B.

Morse debuted two years before, revolutionized the speed of news, much the same way the Internet revolutionized the speed of news in this era. -

Walt

The governor's message which we published today was transmitted from Albany to New York yesterday. Yet it was in type, printed and for sale in Brooklyn and New York by four o'clock. -

Andrew

Yet, politics eventually reared its head. Walt sided with the Free Soil Democrats who strongly resisted the expansion of slavery into the territories. This clashed with the newspaper's pro-slavery owners. He's continually overwhelmingly prolific with his writing.

So, it's not laziness, I think, at all that gets him moving from one paper to another. I think he's a very strongly opinionated guy and on newspapers where the owner and the editor set the political agenda for the newspapers, when Whitman ran into opposition with the editors, he was not afraid to express that opposition. And even occasionally, to try to get into that person's paper views that were not what that person wanted to see expressed. Those were the things, I think, that got him moving from one paper to another.

Editors would often try to find excuses for why they were getting rid of Walt Whitman and the laziness excuse was one that came up. Once again, in early 1848, Walt was out of a job but his life was about to take a very different direction. A few days after being fired while attending a play, Walt struck up a conversation during intermission with J.E. McClure, a newspaper man.

McClure was starting a daily newspaper in New Orleans called "The Crescent" and offered Whitman a job on the spot. He immediately accepted. During the first act of the play, Walt was unemployed. By the second, he was the editor of a New Orleans daily newspaper.

Two days later, he was on his way to New Orleans with his 14-year-old brother, Jeff. (lively music) His first time outside of the Northeast, Whitman was enthralled with New Orleans and the South. He found the city alive with colors and aromas. The peddlers hocking crabs, the young women selling flowers.

He and Jeff arrived in New Orleans just after the Mexican-American War had ended. Walking through the city's parks, Walt encountered soldiers camping out, newly returned from the war. He also met the most famous general of the war, Zachary Taylor, who would be elected president of the United States later that year. -

Walt

I was there at the conclusion of the Mexican War. Saw and talked with General Taylor and the other generals and officers, who were feted and detained several days, on their return victorious from that expedition. (mellow piano music) -

Andrew

The war with Mexico had been controversial. Some considered it an unjust war. A land grab to extend slave territory in which the United States expanded all the way to the Pacific Ocean. At war's end, Mexico ceded to the US nearly all the territory, now part of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah Western Colorado and California, for $15 million.

Yet, Whitman supported the war with Mexico, declaring in "The Brooklyn Eagle". -

Walt

Cold must be the pulse and throbless to all good thoughts. No true Americans will it be, which cannot respond to the valorous emprise of our soldiers and commanders in Mexico. -

Andrew

He also embraced the idea of manifest destiny, a political doctrine that the United States was truly destined to grow westward until reaching the Pacific Ocean. He and his brother, Jeff, rented rooms across the street from "The Crescent" with Jeff working as an office boy for the paper while Walt was the exchange editor. But despite its many charms, New Orleans also brought Walt face to face with slavery. As a child, he had seen slaves for New York did not fully abolish slavery until 1827.

But in New Orleans, he witnessed public slave auctions and read ads from slave traders in his own newspaper. This buying and selling of humans repelled him as later expressed in the poem, "I Sing the Body Electric". (calm music) -

Walt

The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred. It is no matter who. Is it a slave? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?

Each has his or her place in the procession. All is a procession. The universe is a procession with measured and beautiful motion. A slave at auction.

I help the auctioneer. The sloven does not half know his business. Gentlemen, look on this curious creature, whatever the bids of the bidders, they cannot be high enough for him. For him, the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant, for him, the revolving cycles truly and steadily rolled.

In that head, the all-baffling brain, In it and below it, the making of the attributes of heroes. If life and the soul are sacred, the human body is sacred. -

Andrew

As the months went by, Walt and Jeff grew homesick and receiving few letters from home, worried about their family. Walt was starting to have arguments with the paper's owner about slavery and money. By late May, they returned to New York. Although his time in New Orleans lasted only several months, it had a strong impact on the poet.

I think "I Sing the Body Electric" is very much a New Orleans poem. I think it's a poem that grows out of that experience of having witnessed slave auctions. Again, it was Whitman experiencing something that he had read about and heard about and the experience of it changed everything for him. He saw the dehumanization of Black people that, not only slavery but the slave auction itself actually underscored and emphasized for him in brutal ways.

He brought back with him from New Orleans a slave auction poster and some ads about returning runaway slaves from newspapers including "The Crescent", the paper he worked for which printed those ads for runaway slaves. And he always would keep that above his desk as he was writing back in Brooklyn. -

Andrew

Walt Whitman never became an abolitionist. But when he returned to New York, he became very involved with the new Free Soil Party, which opposed the spread of slavery into the new states and territories. He served as a delegate at that third party's National Convention in Buffalo, started a Free Soil newspaper and campaigned for Martin Van Buren, the Free Soil candidate for president. But his political hopes came to naught.

Van Buren lost the 1848 election to General Zachary Taylor of the Whig Party whom Whitman had met in New Orleans. His newspaper folded after just a year. Now, he would turn his attention to other pursuits. (somber piano music) Feeling disillusioned with politics, Walt went into business with his father and brothers.

They operated a print shop and house building business as Brooklyn was experiencing a building boom. The Whitman's lived together in the same house on Myrtle Avenue, but for Whitman, these were days of preparation. The gathering of the forces as he later called it. Making up for a scant education, he read voraciously on religion, history and science.

He kept a notebook to record observations and insights. He was simmering, as he liked to say. Forging the raw materials into what would be a new kind of poetry. He loved riding the ferry and taking long walks, befriending ferryboat captains, dock workers and Broadway horse car drivers.

He would often sit up front with them and recite Shakespeare. He knew the worker's names and stories. -

Walt

They had immense qualities, eating, drinking, women, great personal pride in their way. Perhaps a few slouches here and there but I should have trusted the general run of them in their simple goodwill and honor under all circumstances. -

Andrew

Once, when a friend of his, an omnibus driver, fell ill, Walt finished his route and gave the earnings to the man's family. The group that he particularly kind of falls in with are these omnibus drivers as they were called. Effectively, they were cab drivers. Many of them got into horrible accidents.

There was no safety net whatsoever and these guys were, they lived paycheck to paycheck. And you get in a horrible accident, your body is broken. Well, what are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to make a living now and so on?

So, well, that's actually how Walt first started making his hospital visits, visiting these young men who had been in terrible traffic accidents, basically, or thrown from the omnibus, from the cab 'cause they were outside of the cab and foo, get flung off of it. And that's basically where he had the first idea of visiting people in the hospital and helping them out and comforting them and whatnot. And so, we very quickly then, he takes that over to the Civil War because he's done this before. He knows what kind of impact it can have on other people.

(woman singing in Italian) -

Andrew

One Of Whitman's favorite activities in the evening was attending the opera. He would later write in "Song of Myself" about his favorite opera singer, the soprano Marietta Alboni. -

Walt

I hear the sound of the human voice, a sound I love. I hear the trained soprano. She convulses me like the climax of my love-grip. The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies.

It wrenches unnameable artists from my breast. A tenor, large and fresh as the creation fills me. The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full. (man singing in foreign language) But for the opera, I could not have written "Leaves of Grass".

-

Andrew

This was a happy time in Walt's life. Time of unlimited possibilities with a future wide open as expressed in his poem, "Song of the Open Road". (mellow guitar music) -

Walt

Afoot and lighthearted, I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me. The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, Henceforth, I whimper no more, postpone no more.

Need nothing, Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms. Strong and content, I travel the open road. O highway I travel, do you say to me, do not leave me? Do you say venture not, if you leave me, you are lost?

Do you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied, adhere to me? O public road, I say back, I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you, You express me better than I can express myself. You shall be more to me than my poem. I inhale great drafts of space.

The east and the west are mine and the north and the south are mine. I am larger, better than I thought. I did not know I held so much goodness. All seems beautiful to me.

Allons! Whoever you are come travel with me! Traveling with me, you find what never tires. The earth never tires.

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first. Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first. Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well enveloped. I swear to you, there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

-

Andrew

The city inspired him but there was one building in particular that stood out. These days, people enjoy spending the afternoon at Bryant Park next to the New York Public Library. But what few know is that this was once the site of a magnificent building covering nearly five acres. Built in 1853, it was called the Crystal Palace and was one of Walt Whitman's favorite places to visit.

Shaped like a Greek cross with a largest dome in the Western Hemisphere. It hosted the first World's Fair in the United States in 1853. Whitman called it- -

Walt

An edifice certainly unsurpassed, anywhere for beauty and all the other requisites for a perfect edifice. One of the few that put modern times, not beneath old times, but on an equality with them. -

Andrew

A 17-year-old Mark Twain called it a perfect fairy palace. Beautiful beyond description. Walt loved the exhibits on art and science and the staggering variety of objects on display. -

Walt

I went a long time, nearly a year, days and nights, especially the latter. -

Andrew

Sometimes, he visited with omnibus drivers he befriended. His frequent visits may have even shaped his poetry, especially, his tendency to catalog many diverse items that are thematically linked. His visits to places like the Crystal Palace and the New Egyptian Museum were very important part of his day-to-day education as was going up and down Broadway and encountering the diversity of human life in New York City. These were the things that he absorbed and then refracted and expressed in his poetry.

-

Andrew

One of the most majestic buildings in New York, the Crystal Palace was destroyed in a fire just five years after it was built. In only 20 minutes, the building and all the exhibits burned to the ground. It has been almost completely forgotten by history. (somber piano music) As Walt sauntered throughout the city, he jotted down poetic lines and ideas in notebooks that he carried.

-

Walt

I often wander all day on Manhattan Island through streets toward the East River, on purpose, to have the pleasure hearing the voices of the native born and bred workmen and apprentices in the spar yards, drivers calling to their horses and the like. -

Andrew

Poetic lines came to him spontaneously. He reminded himself- -

Walt

Make it plain. Lumber the writing with nothing. Let it go as a lightly as a bird flies in the air or a fish swims in the sea. -

Andrew

In another notebook, he wrote- -

Walt

Keep it simple and clear. Being not a cult. Too much attempt at ornament is the blur upon nearly all literary styles. It's part of the intimacy and part of the realism that was happening as well, that he's at the crux of Romanticism changing into Realism and he can be seen with elements of both but in order to talk in an intimate way, he needed to use ordinary language too.

He wants the reader to come close and touch. He wants this intimate contact with the reader and so, it's the language of intimacy as well and the language of all the people. The working people on, the blab of the pave and the chuff of the neck and the, he also would use French and sometimes, Spanish, even. (calm curious music) -

Andrew

One of the enduring mysteries of Walt Whitman's life that nobody has been able to answer is how could an ordinary newspaper writer who never published poetry before and had little education or training create a work of such genius, unprecedented in world literature. The emergence of "Leaves of Grass" is truly one of the mysteries of world literature, of human creation. -

Andrew

Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke was a close friend of Whitman's during the poet's later years. Bucke wrote one of the earliest biographies on Walt Whitman and served as co-executor of his literary estate. Bucke believed that in June of 1853 or 1854, when Whitman was around 35 years old, he had a cosmic and transcendent experience that played a role in infusing his poetry with a profound spiritual wisdom.

Bucke describes this belief in his book, "Cosmic Consciousness", in which he profiles Whitman and others throughout history who had spontaneous transcendent experiences that deeply changed them and their work, offering a glimpse into the immortality of all things. Bucke himself was no stranger to such a mystical experience. He reports that in 1872, he experienced a transcendent vision after reading "Leaves of Grass" and other poetry with friends. William James, the father of psychology in the United States describes Bucke's mystical account in his classic 1902 book, "The Varieties of Religious Experience".

Although Walt Whitman never spoke publicly about a profound mystical experience, there are hints throughout his notebooks from the 1850s while he was writing "Leaves of Grass". -

Walt

I am in a mystic trance exaltation, something wild untamed. Half savage. -

Andrew

He later wrote about being- -

Walt

In a trance, yet with all senses alert, with the objective world suspended or surmounted for a while and the powers in exaltation, freedom, vision. Have you any doubt of mortality? I say there can be no more doubt of immortality than there is of mortality. Never speak of the soul as anything but intrinsically great.

The adjective affixed to it must always testify greatness and immortality and purity. -

Andrew

Although some scholars disagree with Bucke's theory, others are open to his interpretation as a contributing factor. It must have been even more stunning for him as the creator than it is for us as the recipients and readers to have gone along in life and to be a rather ordinary guy who wasn't especially well-educated in a formal sense. Yeah, he kicked around from one journalistic job to another. Yeah, he worked a bit in carpentry.

Yeah, he worked a little bit in investments in Brooklyn and did a few other things but none of this predicts kind of a world literature changing volume and yet, there it is. It suddenly emerges. And so, perhaps, this account of there's the ordinary me and then every once in a while, I'm able to access some other layer that gets me access to powers I didn't even realize I had. That seems to be what happened because he didn't need to read books if he had the experience of it that he was describing.

And if he had read the books, he wouldn't have understood it, really, in the way that probably, the divine is flowing through everybody and he sees that and everybody's equal what he got and saw. -

Andrew

Perhaps, nowhere is this spiritual wisdom as clearly expressed, as in Whitman's longest and most renowned poem, "Song of Myself". And so he does seem to think about distinctions between the self and between one person that is the person that we offer to the world in our day to day interactions and it is the person that meets obligations and rounds the edges of otherwise blunt ideas or gets along, et cetera. And then there's some other more profound self. For Whitman, I think, to some extent, that more profound self was in the role of the observer.

(calm music) -

Walt

I believe in you my soul. The other I am must not abase itself to you and you must not be abased to the other. I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning. You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me and parted the shirt from my bosom-bone and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart and reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth. And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own and I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own. And that all the men ever born are also my brothers and the women, my sisters and lovers and that a kelson of the creation is love. I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women and the hints about old men and mothers and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere. The smallest sprout shows there is really no death and if ever there was, it led forward life and does not wait at the end to arrest it and ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward and nothing collapses and to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him, it is just as lucky to die and I know it. I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-washed babe and am not contained between my hat and boots and peruse manifold objects, no two alike, and every one good.

The earth good and the stars good and their adjuncts all good. And I think for Whitman, God is ultimately everything that is existing in any particular moment of now. So I'm not questioning God because I see God every time I touch something, tastes something, hear something, see something. -

Walt

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth. I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself. They do not know how immortal but I know. Have you reckoned a thousand acres much?

Have you reckoned the earth much? Have you practiced so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun. There are millions of suns left. You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the specters in books. You shall not look through my eyes either nor take things from me.

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. The idea that, for Whitman, now is the only eternal moment. There will always be a now and that's all there will be. We don't live in a past, we don't live in a future.

We only live in a now. -

Walt

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, nor any more youth or age than there is now and will never be any more perfection than there is now, nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world. Logic and sermons never convince.

The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul. Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so. Only what nobody denies is so. A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics in books.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars. And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven and the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery and the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue and a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextrillions of infidels. -

Andrew

In "Song of Myself", Whitman distinguishes between one's personality and the larger self. The deeper self is of the same essence as the universal spirit and that true knowledge is acquired, not through the senses or intellect but through union with this self. (light calm music) -

Walt

The latest news. The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love or loss or lack of money or depressions or exaltations, they come to me days and nights and go from me again but they are not the me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am. Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary.

Looks with its side-curved head curious what will come next, both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. I and this mystery, here we stand. Clear and sweet is my soul and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one, lacks both and the unseen is proved by the seen till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, regardless of others, ever regardful of others. Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man. Shall I pray? Shall I venerate and be ceremonious?

I have pride through the strata and analyzed to a hair and counseled with doctors and calculated close and found no sweeter fat that sticks to my own bones. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large.

I contain multitudes. Just as literature had sort of taken the top part of the body, it had also taken the top part of society. So, it was the wealthy, the successful, the upper class or aristocrats if it was in Europe or the royalty but it wasn't the bricklayer and it wasn't the butcher and it wasn't the immigrant and it wasn't the mixed race person hunting in Montana or Wyoming. And Whitman sets himself the task of writing about the entire country and and trying to view all people on an equal footing.

-

Walt

This is the meal pleasantly set. This is the meat and drink for natural hunger. It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous. I make appointments with all.

I will not have a single person slighted or left away. The keptwoman and sponger and thief are hereby invited. The heavy-lipped slave is invited, the venerealee is invited. There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly and sensual. Eating drinking and breeding. No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them. No more modest than immodest.

In all people, I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less. And the good or bad I say of myself, I say of them. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man. And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man.

And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. I think that's exactly what Whitman is trying to do is to awaken the reader. Awaken the reader to the reader's own thoughtless acts of discrimination, awaken the reader to the kinds of contradictions that we all contain within us, to awaken the reader to his or her own body and the power of having senses that are awake to the world, to awaken the reader to the idea that when you open your eyes on the world, every time you open your eyes and look out of a window or look out onto a landscape that you see it as if you're the first human being ever seeing it and become overwhelmed and amazed. I think that awakening the reader to the power and the vitality and the majesty of living in a body is exactly what he is out to do.

(calm ambient music) -

Walt

Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams. Now I wash the gum from your eyes. You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life. It is you talking just as much as myself.

I act as the tongue of you. It was tied in your mouth, in mine, it begins to be loosened. I have said that the soul is not more than the body and I have said that the body is not more than the soul and nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is. And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral, dressed in his shroud.

And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth. And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times. And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero. And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe and any man or woman shall stand cool and supercilious before a million universes.

Everything, every leaf is a miracle. The mouse is a miracle enough to stagger sextillion infidels. The pismire, the ant is equally important and beautiful. The smallest thing and the largest thing.

That's the humility, I think, that ant is no great, is great. -

Walt

And I say to mankind, be not curious about God, for I who am curious about each am not curious about God. No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death. I hear and behold God in every object, yet, I understand God not in the least, nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the 24 and each moment then. In the faces of men and women, I see God and in my own face in the glass. I find letters from God dropped in the street and every one is signed by God's name and I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever. And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths.

No doubt I have died myself 10,000 times before. The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. -

Andrew

In "Leaves of Grass", Whitman describes himself not only as the poet of the soul but also the poet of the body. He celebrated sensuality and the beauty of the human body in a way very few poets did before him. -

Walt

I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the soul. The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me. If life and the soul are sacred, the human body is sacred. I believe in the flesh and the appetites.

Seeing, hearing and feeling are miracles and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I inside and out and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from. The scent of these armpits aroma finer than prayer. This head more than churches or bibles or creeds.

Part of Whitman's inclusiveness of vision was that the entire body, every part of the body is crucial. That frontispiece of the 1855 "Leaves of Grass" is the first full body portrait of a poet. It's had more influence on poetry through the 20th century and 21st century than any other image. Now, every poet portrays himself or herself in outdoor clothes, casual clothes, sometimes wearing a hat but it's the full bodyness.

He's the first poet with a crotch. The first poet with a torso. Before this, poets were always shoulder and heads. (calm music) -

Andrew

He most celebrates the body in his poem, "I Sing the Body Electric". -

Walt

The expression of the body of man or woman balks account. The male is perfect and that of the female is perfect. But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, it is in his limbs and joints also. It is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists.

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees. Dress does not hide him. To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more. This is the female form.

A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot. It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction. I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor. All falls aside but myself and it.

-

Andrew

On the 4th of July, 1855, Walt Whitman self-published "Leaves of Grass". It was a slim green book that did not bear the author's or publisher on the title page. A portrait of the poet on the opposite page showed his plain shirt, open at the collar. His hat cocked upon his head.

One hand on his hip, the other in his pocket. The book had no table of contents and none of the 12 poems had a title. Whitman published the book himself, even doing much of the typesetting in a Brooklyn print shop. One positive review stated- -

Reviewer

Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all the attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature, talking like a man unaware that there was ever hitherto such a production as a book or such a being as a writer. -

Andrew

The author of this glowing review, Walt Whitman. In fact, Whitman anonymously wrote several favorable reviews using his connections in the press to publish them. One of Whitman's character flaws was a willingness to be underhanded when it came to promoting his work. Walt was sort of, he was a one-man band and he understood the value of promotion.

Americans, overall, we are terrible poetry readers. We generally don't read poetry. And I think Walt was ambitious. He wanted to be known as America's great poet.

And so, he, early on, began writing his own reviews under different names and publishing them. He also got the ability to write articles about himself in say, "The Evening Star" in Washington, DC 'cause he was friends with the publisher. -

Andrew

He printed 795 copies and offered them for sale at a local shop. But they barely sold. Whitman said he doubted if even 10 were sold and that he ended up giving away most of the copies to friends and relatives. Whitman's frank depiction of the human body and sensuality made some reviewers dislike the book.

-

Reviewer

It is impossible to imagine how any man's fancy could have conceived such a mass of stupid filth. -

Andrew

Another wondered if its author must be- -

Reviewer

Some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium. -

Andrew

Even Walt's family was apathetic. His brother George said- -

George

I saw the book. I didn't read it at all. Didn't think it was worth reading. (somber piano music) -

Andrew

The world may never have heard of Walt Whitman were it not for a letter he received later that July. Whitman had sent a copy of the book to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most widely respected American essayist whose lecture on poetry years before greatly inspired Whitman. Emerson sent him a glowing letter. -

Ralph

July 21, 1855, Concord, Massachusetts. Dear sir, I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "Leaves of Grass". I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I find incomparable things said incomparably well.

I greet you at the beginning of such a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion. -

Andrew

Recognizing the promotional value of this letter, Whitman had it printed in the "New-York Tribune" and other newspapers without Emerson's permission. Even though Emerson's letter was a private communication, not intended for publication. The following year, when Whitman self-published a second edition of "Leaves of Grass", he pleased Emerson's praise on the book's spine in gold letters. "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." The second edition in 1856 had 20 new poems.

The most famous is "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" about a ferry that Walt often rode across the East River, connecting Brooklyn with Manhattan. But on another level, the poem connects the poet's time with future generations. (calm mellow music) -

Walt

Flood tide below me, I see you face to face. Clouds of the west, sun there half an hour high, I see you also face to face. Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me. On the ferry boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home are more curious to me than you suppose.

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me and more in my meditations than you might suppose. Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore, others will watch the run of the flood tide, Others will see the shipping of Manhattan, north and west and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east. Others will see the islands large and small. 50 years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high.

A hundred years hence or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb tide. I am with you, you men and women of a generation or ever so many generations hence. Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt. Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd.

Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refreshed. Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried. What is it then between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Several times in some of the poems, he said, "You up there, are you listening to me?" He's talking to you up there. Who's the you up there? Me, reading the book. Each person reading the book.

It's an intimate or you've got me in your pocket, in your back pocket, meaning his book but that's him. Who reads this book reads a man. He didn't always distinguish between word and poetry and himself. In this moment of reading it now where Whitman collapses his past and our present into a single moment of now.

And I think that is the magical act in Whitman. He gets in that poem something that I don't think he ever quite achieves anywhere else. And that is what he says, we understand then, do we not? What the preachers have preached but could never prove, we've just proven it.

And what we've proven is that the dead and the living can speak to each other. (calm piano music) -

Walt

Whatever it is, it avails not, distance avails not, and place avails not. I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine. I too walked the streets of Manhattan Island and bathed in the waters around it. I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me.

In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes, they came upon me. In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me. Closer yet I approach you. What thought you have of me, I had as much of you.

I laid in my stores in advance, I considered long and seriously of you before you were born. Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now for all you cannot see me? -

Andrew

Whitman sent a copy of the second edition to the writer Henry David Thoreau, who had published "Walden" two years before. Thoreau returned the gesture by visiting Whitman in November 1856, along with fellow Concorde resident Bronson Alcott. When the New Englanders visited Whitman in his apartment that he shared with his severely disabled younger brother Eddie, they were surprised to see the bed unmade and home very messy. But Thoreau and Whitman got along very well.

Thoreau is a great admirer of "Leaves of Grass". Even if he did not always agree with Walt's frankness in describing the human body. The first two editions sold very poorly. It seemed the public was uninterested in his work and Whitman could not find a publisher.

He began to wonder, would he ever fulfill Emerson's prophecy of a national poet arising from America? (lively piano music) At this spot on 647 Broadway, underground was once a beer cellar called Pfaff's. Beginning in the late 1850s, this is where Walt spent his evenings. Pfaff's was the center of New York Bohemia, a precursor to Dorothy Parker's Algonquin Table, a place for writers, actors and artists who gathered around a table for a witty conversation.

They discussed art, traded barbs, ate, drank and rummery. Henry Clapp, editor of the Saturday press known as the King of Bohemia possessed a razor-sharp wit and led the carousing. The free spirited Charleston actress Ada Clare, the queen of Bohemia was a regular as was the actor Edwin Booth, regarded as the greatest tragic actor of his day. Artemus Ward, considered the first stand-up comedian in America, often visited.

Pfaff's is where Walt found friends and lovers among New York's counterculture. He began a relationship with Fred Vaughan, an Irish horse car driver who likely inspired some of Walt's most romantic poems. His involvement with Pfaff's begins in the very late 1850s and into the beginning part of the Civil War. And it was during this period that he seems to have met Fred Vaughan and Fred Vaughan may have been the inspiration for the sequence of love poems, "Live Oak, with Moss", that eventually becomes the "Calamus" poems.

-

Andrew

Around this time, Walt wrote one of his most renowned poems, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", originally called "A Word from the Sea" that recalls the moment Walt first became a poet. -

Walt

A man, yet by these tears, a little boy again. Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter, taking all hints to use them but swiftly leaping beyond them. A reminiscence sing. He's a young boy observing two birds that had been mates and then suddenly, one of them has gone, so there's the experience of death but it's also sort of an awareness of the young boy who's just at the age of sort of coming into an understanding of his own sexuality and his own maturity, his own sort of glimmerings of love and longing and loss.

He also, here's in the bird song, something that he wants to respond to and so he begins to hear himself as it were translating the bird song and in doing that, he discovers his own vocation. -

Walt

Till of a sudden, maybe killed unknown to her mate. One forenoon, the she-bird crouched not on the nest, nor returned that afternoon, nor the next, nor ever appeared again. He called on his mate. He poured forth the meanings which I of all men know.

"Demon or bird!" said the boy's soul. Is it indeed toward your mate you sing or is it really to me? Now in a moment I know what I am for. I awake and already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours.

A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die. By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon, the messenger there aroused, the fire, the sweet hell within, the unknown want, the destiny of me. The very end of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", ends with a five-fold, repetition, death, death, death, death death. And that's the cradle out of which we all come and it's the bed into which we all eventually return.

That is if this sound of the repetition of death is when he finally hears the waves saying to him as I sits on the shore of Long Island and listens to the ocean coming in and finally says, aha, that's what it's saying. Death, death, death. Because the sea is the ultimate composter until we've managed to figure out ways in the 20th and 21st century to so poison it, that it can't compost all that we're throwing into it. In Whitman's time it still was the ultimate composter.

Anything that got thrown into the ocean eventually would be broken down into the elements and become part of that ocean itself. And that, every sound that that ocean is bringing to the shores is a sound of death even though it contains and is full of life. That, for Whitman, is what's delicious about that sound of the word death. -

Walt

A word then, for I will conquer it. Are you whispering it and have been all the time, you sea waves? Whereto answering the sea, delaying not, hurrying not, whispered me through the night and very plainly before daybreak. Lisped to me the low and delicious word, death.

And again, death, death, death, death. My own songs awaked from that hour and with them, the key, the word up from the waves, the word of the sweetest song and all songs, that strong and delicious word which creeping to my feet or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside, the sea whispered me. (mellow piano music) -

Andrew

Whitman added 78 poems to a third edition of "Leaves of Grass" but still struggled to find a publisher. Then in early 1860, his luck finally turned. He received a letter from the Boston publishing firm, Thayer & Eldridge. The publishers were very impressed with "Leaves of Grass" and offered to publish the third edition.

Walt soon left for Boston and went to work in their publishing office, correcting page proofs and setting type for the new edition that was even more blatantly sexual. One section entitled "Calamus" contain many homoerotic poems. The poem, "A Glimpse" could've occurred at Pfaff's. -

Walt

A youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand. A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest, there we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word. -

Andrew

Another section, "Children of Adam" had poems overtly sexual between men and women. Emerson visited Whitman and the two strolled for hours in Boston Common, the city's main public park. Emerson advised Whitman that some of his poetry would shock readers who were not accustomed to overt sexuality. If the books were to sell, Walt needed to remove or expurgate the offending lines.

But Walt refused. -

Walt

If I had cut sex out, I might just as well have cut everything out. Expurgation is apology, an admission that something or other was wrong. Emerson said, expurgate. I said, no, no.

I have not lived to regret, my Emerson, no. The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book. -

Andrew

While at the publishing office, Walt meets a fellow author, William O'Connor, who would become a very important friend in Walt's life. Although hopes were high to make the third edition to success, the Boston Publishing Company went out of business by year's end as most Americans were preoccupied with the secession crisis. (somber music) As 1860 drew to a close, not in his wildest dreams or worst nightmares could Walt Whitman have imagined all that would soon happen to him, his family and his country. (calm piano music) (mellow piano music)