Original subtitles

NARRATOR: He was the son of American soil,

a child of its hope,

America's rude adolescent,

its spurned lover,

its faithful nurse,

its unwavering champion

and the creator of its own poetic voice,

a voice to be reckoned with.

MARTIN ESPADA: "I speak the password primeval,

"I give the sign of democracy;

"By God!

"I will accept nothing

"which all cannot have their counterpart of

on the same terms."

ED FOLSOM: Walt Whitman believed

that, really, a book was going to prevent a civil war.

WALT WHITMAN (dramatized): There shall be from me

a new friendship.

It shall be called after my name.

ALLAN GURGANUS: To have come up with a vision that was so immense...

DAVID REYNOLDS: He expected people to be healed.

WHITMAN (dramatized): I celebrate myself.

And what I assume you shall assume.

ESPADA: It wasn't just vanity. It wasn't just ego.

Certainly he wanted to be heard.

But he also had something to say.

Walt Whitman is a poet of urgency.

WHITMAN (dramatized): I am to see to it

that I do not lose you.

I am faithful,

I do not give out.

FOLSOM: How to absorb this national disaster?

And what new life now,

for America, can possibly grow out of it?

� �

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� �

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KAREN KARBIENER: We're at this incredibly volatile time.

The country is divided into two.

ALLAN GURGANUS: And yet, there was a kind of listlessness

among the population.

A passivity and a drift and a cynicism.

NARRATOR: As the country slouched toward Civil War in the 1850s,

one concerned citizen was trying mightily to wake his countrymen

to the dangers of their bitterness and despond.

He'd already spent his own small treasure

to publish a book of poetry called Leaves of Grass.

The American democratic experiment needed saving,

he had implored in Leaves,

was worth saving.

For his effort, he'd been called

"preposterous," "nonsensical," "grotesque" and "scurvy."

A lesser man would have been shamed into silence.

Walt Whitman determined to speak louder.

He was willing to fight the tide all the way,

to stand fast against derision, neglect

and the relentless undertow of his own doubt,

to sacrifice his financial well-being,

his family, his personal life and his health,

all in the service of forcing America

to face its strange new self.

WHITMAN (dramatized): Never more shall I escape.

Never more the cries of unsatisfied love

be absent from me.

Never again leave me

to be the peaceful child I was before

what there in the night,

under the yellow and sagging moon,

the messenger there aroused...

...the fire,

the sweet hell within.

The unknown want,

the destiny of me.

(children shouting playfully)

(insects buzzing)

(birds chirping)

(child panting)

NARRATOR America's first great poet

entered the world at the margins,

on a working-class farm on Long Island, New York,

into a family that held tight

to the promise of the young country.

His ancestors, Walt was reminded,

had sacrificed blood in the cause of American independence.

ED FOLSOM: His brothers who came after him

were all named after American heroes.

We have George Washington Whitman,

and we have Thomas Jefferson Whitman,

and we have Andrew Jackson Whitman.

So he grew up

with George Washington and Andrew Jackson

and Thomas Jefferson sitting at his table with him.

GURGANUS: These were the,

the common people, in the literal sense of the word.

And the freedom that he found

in this lack of pedigree assured his right

to choose the person that he wanted to become.

BETSY ERKKILA: He was sensitive

and even overly sensitive

to what was going on around him.

Both in terms of people

but also a very sensuous interaction

with the world.

And from a very early age,

he felt himself called

to do something with this.

(chirping)

NARRATOR: As a boy, Walter Whitman, Jr. had precious little time

to pursue his own dreams.

His father was a farmer, a carpenter

and an unsuccessful real estate speculator,

who struggled all his life

to keep his wife and eight children afloat.

He took Walt out of school at age 11

to help prop up the family's meager income.

The Whitmans' circumstances never lived up to their hopes,

and Walter Whitman, Sr. became an ever more zealous adherent

of strong drink and radical politics.

The elder Whitman came to see his growing streak

of financial failure as the work of forces beyond his control:

banking cabals, organized swindles

and the unchecked power of the propertied class.

"Keep a good heart," he liked to say.

"The worst is yet to come."

At 21, Walt Whitman fled his father's dark shadow

and set his own course in the world.

"I stand for the sunny point of view," he would claim,

"the joyful conclusion."

EDWIN BURROWS: If you're young and ambitious and talented and artistic

and you want to make your mark in the world,

New York was the only place to go in the United States.

It was already the center of everything that was interesting.

There are ships crowding the waterfront

from all over the world;

swarms of sailors speaking all kinds of different languages;

young men rushing back and forth;

clerks, counting houses,

cartmen dragging loads of things.

Whitman could get off the ferry right there

on the foot of Fulton Street

and feel like he had entered the world.

NARRATOR: New York was a city on the rise

and Whitman was swept along

by the rush of its accelerating current.

He was a notable figure, even in a crowd:

six feet tall,

with a personal presence he described as "magnetic."

He was self-educated, stubbornly self-reliant,

and equipped with a self-regard that bordered arrogance.

He had decided, as he would later say,

to "enter with the rest into the competition

"for the usual rewards:

business, political, literary."

And he set out to show the men doing the hiring

on Newspaper Row that he could be as discriminating as they.

GURGANUS: He dresses in a white collar, with a vest,

walking stick, a big floppy fedora,

and tries to pass for a professional man of letters.

And he gets into doors

on the basis of how he appears.

It's not his Harvard pedigree.

He doesn't have one.

What he has is the force of his personality

and how he appears.

NARRATOR: Whitman sported a fresh boutonni�re in his frock coat,

a gold pen, and a silver timepiece.

But he could not long button up his compulsion

to have his say, his way,

which put him in near constant opposition

to society's prevailing sentiments.

As a newspaperman,

Walt staked out radical positions on labor issues,

women's property rights, capital punishment

and immigration.

And he was pleased to pick fights

with the hide-bound editors at rival newspapers.

He brought a bare-knuckled, working-class �lan

to his new business,

railing against the "old moth-eaten systems of Europe"

so many of New York's upper class

seemed intent on emulating.

He called one editor "a reptile

"marking his path with slime wherever he goes,

"and breathing mildew

at everything fresh and fragrant."

His bosses apparently found him all but ungovernable.

In just four years he lost favor at the Tattler,

the Daily Plebeian, the Statesman,

the Mirror, the Democrat,

the Sun and the Star.

DAVID REYNOLDS: He got into a little bit of trouble

because he kind of rubbed up against people,

sometimes, in the wrong way.

And he also got increasingly into trouble

because he didn't like being on a schedule.

And some of his employers thought that he was lazy.

He wasn't the most dedicated worker.

And his love of the city often led him,

during lunch and after lunch,

even though he had duties that would oblige him

to stay in Printing House Row

and do his thing at the various papers he worked for,

he wound up hopping on the omnibus

or walking up to a museum

or to a bar or to the Park Theater

to just see and absorb New York.

ERKKILA: Whitman loved the sense

of a humanity flowing

and huge crowds of people and events going on.

NARRATOR: Like Walt,

New York was inventing itself every day,

lurching toward a destiny it had yet to fully imagine.

The pull of the emerging city

captured Whitman and compelled him

to record in his personal notebooks

what he heard and saw

and felt as he walked nights among the throng,

under gas lamps that made Broadway

a shimmer of white light

or as he ducked into the narrow, dark streets

of the notorious Five Points slum.

He noted the museum of Egyptology

and the tenement house,

the waterworks and the corner saloon,

the lavish opera, the rowdy Bowery theaters,

and, from his seat atop the omnibus,

with the breeze in his face,

the daily human drama of the city streets.

KARBIENER: He's assembling these

collages of what he sees.

And he's also obviously

interested in a lot of the guys that he's checking out.

So we've got these marvelous lists

of whoever's taking his fancy at the time.

GURGANUS: He liked cab drivers.

He liked the guys who had been in the sun all day

and had brown faces;

who were powerful enough through the shoulders

to reign in the horses that were required

to drive one of these immense cabs down Broadway.

NARRATOR: He made it his practice to climb

into the navigator's chair on the omnibus,

where he chatted up drivers like Broadway Jack,

Yellow Joe, Balky Bill,

Old Elephant and his brother Young Elephant,

Big Frank, Patsy Dee and Tippy.

WHITMAN (dramatized): They had immense qualities, largely animal--

eating, drinking, women--

great personal pride.

How many hours, forenoons and afternoons,

how many exhilarating nighttimes I've had,

riding the whole length of Broadway,

listening to some yarn,

and the most vivid yarns ever spun,

and the rarest mimicry.

Or perhaps, I, declaiming some stormy passage

from Julius Caesar and Richard.

You could roar as loudly as you chose

in that heavy, dense, uninterrupted street bass.

BURROWS: The sound...

would have been amazing.

(horses whinny, pigs snort)

(clanking, rattling)

Iron-rimmed wagon wheels clanking across cobblestones--

it was a frightful din.

There are thousands and thousands of horses,

eave tons of manure on the street every day.

Hundreds of gallons of horse piss, every day,

is deposited on the street of New York.

Nobody collects that.

There is no sanitation department

in 19th century New York.

What you have is swarms of pigs, basically,

who roam around the streets,

gobbling up whatever they can find.

In about July or August,

the smell of New York is overpowering.

FOLSOM: The dirt, the rubbish, the filth

that a growing population is producing:

how to deal with this, how to get rid of it,

how to begin to control everything--

from animals walking the street

to housing the endless numbers of people entering the city

and growing numbers of immigrants.

NARRATOR: Walt saw the frantic and furious efforts being made

to tame the frightening mass of new arrivals;

to fit them up to be worthy citizens

of the American republic.

But with as many as 2,000 foreign-born people

entering New York in a single day,

the job was beyond anyone's doing.

Strong voices opined that this new wave

of uneducated immigrants should simply be

excluded from the body politic.

BURROWS: Very often, you'd find genteel writers

who would write about the good old days of the city,

when it was small, when it was intimate,

when everybody knew everybody,

when everybody knew who was in charge

and everybody respected everybody.

KARBIENER: I think about Edgar Allan Poe, for instance,

or Melville, a native New Yorker

who, actually, really didn't like the city.

All they saw were the poor crowds of immigrants,

and dirtiness, and the pigs in the streets.

So there are plenty of people who just see the dark side.

What I love about Whitman

is that this man sees beauty in that.

He sees the Mississippi in Broadway.

He sees identity in the city.

WHITMAN (dramatized): Here are people

of all classes and stages of rank,

from all countries of the globe,

every hue of ignorance and learning,

morality and vice, wealth and want,

fashion and coarseness,

breeding and brutality,

elevation and degradation,

impudence and modesty.

FOLSOM: Whitman feels the power of the city of strangers.

He's looking at a city of strangers

and how something we might now call

"urban affection" begins to develop.

How do you come to care for people

that you have never seen before

and that you may never see again?

Every day, we encounter people,

eyes make contact,

we brush by people,

physically come into contact with them,

and may never see them again.

But Whitman's notebooks at this time

are filled with images...

just jottings of these people...

...what they're doing, what they look like,

what their names are.

What is this person doing?

What's the activity that defines this person?

If I were doing that activity,

that person would be me.

If I were wandering the other way,

rather than this way, that person could be me.

That could be me.

That could be me.

What is it that separates any of us?

NARRATOR: By 1847, within a few years of his arrival in New York,

Whitman's parents and siblings had moved into nearby Brooklyn,

where they tried to cash in on the new building boom...

and failed.

Walt was drawn back into the family home

to help with the finances,

and to bear the weight of his father's final slide

into defeat and bitter resignation.

PRICE: He took on a parental role within the family.

I think as early as 1847

he held the title to the family home,

even though his father would live until 1855.

He's clearly the one they all turn to as the smart one,

the one with insight,

the person who's emotionally stable.

NARRATOR: Despite their downward mobility,

the Whitmans felt themselves tied to a bigger destiny.

Whatever their station,

New Yorkers were apt to see their city

as the ornament of the nation,

a nation that bestrode a continent.

Walt could leave his troubled home,

go to the office and editorialize the glory

of the U.S. victory in the Mexican War,

which landed Americans half a million square miles,

including California, Texas,

and territory enough for a slew of other states.

But the new acquisition raised again, and for good,

an issue on which the nation was hopelessly split.

In 1848, Walt Whitman had

no particular concern for the emancipation

or the welfare of Black slaves.

And he could not abide fanatical abolitionists

who were willing to pull the Union apart

if Southern states refused to renounce slavery.

Whitman was chiefly worried that the white working class

would have to compete with slave labor

in the new Western territories,

as they did all over the South.

WHITMAN (dramatized): In 15 of the states,

350,000 masters of slaves keep down the true people,

the millions of white citizens:

mechanics, farmers, boatmen, manufacturers.

NARRATOR: Whitman's fierce and full-throated cry

for the working man got him fired again,

but a publisher offered the editorship of a new paper:

the Crescent.

There was one catch:

The job was in New Orleans.

FOLSOM: And Whitman

takes him up on it.

It's a chance to see the nation

in a way that he has not... at all.

He hasn't really been out of a very narrow confine

of New York and Long Island.

And so this is going to be, for Whitman, the big trip.

This is going to be Whitman's equivalent

to the trip to Europe

that the children of the privileged classes took.

NARRATOR: Early in 1848,

28-year-old Walt Whitman and his teenaged brother Jeff

steamed out of a gray-wrapped New York winter

and into the mellow weathers of the Deep South.

Peach trees were already in full blossom

when the brothers arrived in New Orleans.

The scent of magnolia, myrtle, and bougainvillea

perfumed the city squares.

Whitman had duties at the newspaper,

but he was seduced by the sensual public life

of New Orleans.

He watched the shirtless dockworkers at the wharves

and the semi-nude actors and actresses

enacting scenes from the Bible;

or sat for hours amid the soft-voiced social whirl

of the open-air bars,

where locals spoke a gumbo of English, French,

Spanish, and Cajun.

He was especially drawn to the young women

selling roses and violets on the street.

WALT WHITMAN (dramatized): Women with splendid bodies--

no bustles, no corsets,

no enormities of any sort:

large, luminous eyes,

faces a rich olive...

fascinating, magnetic, sexual,

ignorant, illiterate;

always more than pretty.

Pretty is too weak a word to apply to them.

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: There is, you know,

the myth of him actually having a relationship

with a... with a Black woman or a Black man.

FOLSOM: He sees racial mixture

and cultural mixture in New Orleans

on a scale that he has not encountered before

and sees that it can work.

It can be exciting.

It can be exhilarating.

It can lead to an intense, new kind of affection.

Because I think part of that urban affection in Whitman

is always that... that sense of... of violation...

...a sense of crossing a barrier and discovering you can cross it

and not be harmed by it, but, in fact, be...

strengthened by it, enlarged by it.

NARRATOR: There was another, more difficult crossing

the trip south forced on Whitman--

a crossing that would haunt him for years.

In New York, where slavery had long been illegal,

Whitman had easily averted his gaze

from the true costs of the institution,

but in New Orleans

he came face to face with the stark fact of human bondage

in a country founded on the idea of freedom,

face-to-face with an entire race of people excluded by law

and by force from the American story.

FOLSOM: He sees slave auctions take place,

and as he sees human beings for sale

he is stunned by the brutality

and the sheer physical force of the experience.

ERKKILA: He would have seen auctioneers

enumerating literally body parts in selling

human beings as commodities.

And buyers would actually feel slave's bodies

in trying to figure out if they were going to buy them.

KOMUNYAKAA: For some reason,

I feel like he has the capacity

to imagine himself

on the auction block as well.

FOLSOM: That could be me.

That could be me.

That person could be me.

KOMUNYAKAA: It really enters his psyche.

I think he's wrestling with himself.

NARRATOR: When Walt returned to his parents' home in Brooklyn,

after just three months in New Orleans,

he carried with him a poster advertising a slave auction

and vague premonitions that the contradictions

in American democracy would prove fatal.

Over the next eight years, the issue of slavery festered.

By 1855, an armed battle had already commenced

on the Kansas-Missouri border,

rickety compromise legislation in Washington crumbled,

the bonds of national affection were being eaten away,

and Whitman could see that the nation's political leaders

were too timid or too self-interested

to minister to the sickness

before it rotted America to the bone.

What the nation needed, Whitman was convinced,

was a call to healing

from a voice that was of, by, and for the common people.

"The poet is representative,"

America's literary eminence Ralph Waldo Emerson

had essayed ten years earlier.

"He stands among partial men for the complete man.

"The poet is the man without impediment,

"who sees and handles that which others dream of,

"traverses the whole scale of experience.

I look in vain for the poet I describe."

GURGANUS: I think Walt Whitman went to the "help wanted" section

and found a squib that said "Wanted: National Poet,"

and he was innocent enough

to believe there really was such a job,

and if he could just write a poem

that incorporated everything he felt and suspected

and hoped for from America,

that he would have the position.

NARRATOR: Alone in the garret of a working-class house

in Brooklyn, New York,

jotting in a 3 1/2 x 5 1/2-inch notebook,

Walt Whitman searched for a poetic voice

that could gather up and bind all the disparate places

and people of America,

a voice that would rise above despair

and cynicism and intolerance

to sing the vast promise of the country.

FOLSOM: As you read through his little notebook,

you can see the moment

where Leaves of Grass begins to emerge.

In typical Whitman fashion,

there are all kinds of things in this notebook--

little notations of what he owes people

and he's got addresses and names of people

and places that he has to go.

And then he begins writing in prose.

He starts out saying, "Be simple and clear.

Be not occult."

He's looking for his voice, and at one point he says,

"Every soul has its own individual voice."

And then, he has a line

that I've always been fascinated with.

It says, "Do not descend

among professors and capitalists."

And he stops at that point

and there are a couple of blank pages

and then, when you turn the page,

suddenly, there it is.

And it starts,

"I am the poet of slaves

"and of the masters of slaves.

"I am the poet of the body

and I am..."

And then he stops.

And in that moment where he writes "and I am,"

I can feel the moment where Whitman senses that "I"

that is going to become his main character in all of his poems,

that "I" has come into existence.

"And I am."

And then he crosses those lines out

and there's a little space

and then he writes the first lines

that are going to get into Leaves of Grass.

"I am the poet of the body

"and I am the poet of the soul.

"I go with the slaves of the earth

"equally with the masters.

"And I will stand between the master and the slaves,

"entering into both

so that both will understand me alike."

And there it is.

Everything that's going to be great in Whitman

is in those lines.

NARRATOR: Out of that small notebook grew a thin volume

with 12 untitled poems,

typeset by the hand of the poet.

ESPADA: "I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume..."

"For every atom belonging to me

"as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul..."

"I loafe and invite my soul,

"I lean and loafe at my ease,

observing a spear of summer grass."

WHITMAN (dramatized): 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.

ESPADA: "I speak the password primeval.

"I give a sign of democracy;

"By God! I will accept nothing

"which all cannot have their counterpart of

"on the same terms.

"Through me, forbidden voices.

"Voices of sexes and lusts.

"Voices veiled, and I remove the veil.

Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured."

BILLY COLLINS: Here was the first truly American poet

who broke out of the form of formal poetry.

You know how, in a sonnet, you have these boundaries?

Leaves of Grass is a poem without boundaries,

and so that everything can flood into it.

Uh, people, professions,

landscape, memories,

engineering, water,

children, Native Americans.

There's no boundaries keeping anything out.

NARRATOR: Leaves of Grass contained astronomy, mythology,

Egyptology, religions of the East and West

and the latest science.

The sublime operatic line and the blunt, coarse talk

of the Five Points were in Leaves.

The carpenter, the printer, the half-breed,

patriarchs, prostitutes, opium eaters

and the President himself peopled the poems.

The squaw in her yellow-hemmed cloth was there on the page,

the bride in her white dress.

Kentuckian, Georgian and Californian.

What joined them to one another was the firm embrace

of the poet himself,

who was, after all, just one of the crowd.

FOLSOM: Whitman portrays himself

on the title page in the frontispiece

without his name,

but with an image of himself

unlike any image of a poet before.

It's not the poet from the shoulders up,

dressed in formal dress,

which emphasizes the poetry that comes from the intellect,

the poetry that comes from a life of privilege and education.

Instead, this is poetry that comes from a life

of walking in the streets.

It's the poetry that emerges through the hands and arms,

and through the heart pumping blood

to all parts of the body.

The perspiration, the aroma of these armpits,

Whitman talks about-- aroma finer than prayer.

PRICE: This is everything about sinews.

This was everything about crotch.

This was everything about armpits.

For him, you couldn't have an honest poetry

that wasn't including the whole person.

KARBIENER: Nakedness, from the first page, is celebrated.

Whitman's openness and celebration of sexuality,

and not just heterosexual sex,

but sex on the edges--

uh, masturbation, uh, voyeurism,

um, oral sex, uh-- it's in there.

(birds singing)

GURGANUS: I grew up in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina.

There was not a working bookshop,

but there was a stationery department

in the corner of the best department store.

And there, among the greeting cards,

were a few books, including Leaves of Grass.

I had somehow heard through the ten-year-old grapevine

that it had some hot stuff in it.

I bought it, assuming that the clerk would believe

that it was for inspirational purposes,

and pedaled to the nearest woods.

And I opened and began looking for the good parts,

and discovered that, in a strange way,

it's all good parts in Whitman.

That you're never more than four lines

from an erotic jot.

There... You're never very far away from the body.

(birds singing)

WHITMAN (dramatized): 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 me

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 elder hand of my own.

There's a whole thing about the sexuality and all.

But I think maybe

there is a kind of deeper, more serious taboo.

FOLSOM: Whitman equates the human body and democracy

in some radical and essential way.

That the human body is what we all share.

We all experience this world through the body.

And if we can all begin to agree

that the body itself is a sacred thing,

then we have the beginnings of democracy.

KOMUNYAKAA: "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 makings of attributes of heroes.

"Examine these limbs,

"red, black or white.

"They are very cunning in tendon and nerve.

"They shall be stripped that you may see them.

"Exquisite senses,

"life lit eyes pluck volition...

"and wonders within there yet.

"Within there runs his blood.

"The same old blood.

The same red running blood."

NARRATOR Walt could afford to print only 795 copies

of his ungainly, oversized first edition.

A few hundred he bound

in dark green cloth, the rest in paper.

He found a few stores willing to stock the book,

set a price, and loosed it on the world.

KARBIENER: There were some writers

that really supported that vision,

but there were so many bad reviews.

And many of them came from prestigious voices of the day.

One or more reviewer will suggest

that he be whipped in the streets,

and that one suggests he should commit suicide.

Another reviewer said

that this author must be like a lunatic,

an escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium.

Other people describe Leaves of Grass

as being like an explosion in a sewer.

And so... so people go to great lengths

to really say some brutal things about his book.

NARRATOR: Whitman was oddly cheered

by the reaction of the literary elite.

He liked that they seemed so obviously threatened

by his homemade book.

In fact, the force and volume of the denunciation

of Leaves of Grass

only increased Whitman's already high hopes.

PRICE: Whitman had a remarkable faith

in ordinary people to understand his book.

It's celebrating American democracy.

It's talking the language of the people.

It's attacking aristocratic influences in American life.

Why wouldn't this be very, very popular with the people?

He expected stage drivers

to stop between runs and pull out a copy of Leaves of Grass.

People going out to plow the fields have a copy

of Leaves of Grass in their very large back pocket

to accommodate that, that huge book.

In the preface to this book, he had written:

"This is what you shall do.

"You shall take my volume, every month, out in nature,

and you'll read it under the sky."

And he expected people to be healed.

And he expected America, really, to kind of come together

in this vision, this poetic vision.

NARRATOR: Walt's poetic vision did not exactly sweep the nation.

A dozen people bought the book, maybe two-dozen.

Whitman gave away more than he sold.

His own family showed little interest.

"I saw the book," said Walt's brother George.

"Didn't read it at all;

didn't think it worth reading."

The one glimmer of hope came from the high arbiter

of literary America, Ralph Waldo Emerson,

to whom Whitman had sent one of the first copies

of Leaves of Grass.

Emerson's actual response was markedly ambivalent.

He wrote to friends that Leaves was "a nondescript monster,"

with "terrible eyes and buffalo strength,

American to the bone."

He wasn't convinced the book could properly be called poetry.

But Emerson also recognized

that Leaves of Grass could not be ignored,

that its author merited encouragement.

And Emerson, who was the god, in some ways, of American letters,

took the time out to write Whitman an extraordinary letter,

in which he basically says

that he rubbed his eyes a little bit to see if this was no dream.

NARRATOR: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit

and wisdom that America has yet contributed," Emerson wrote.

"I give you joy of your free and brave thought.

"I have great joy in it.

"I find incomparable things said incomparably well,

"as they must be.

I greet you at the beginning of a great career."

There are very few people in our culture

who would be a concomitant figure to Emerson then.

It's a combination of Billy Graham and Oprah Winfrey.

It's so powerful to imagine

that Whitman told nobody he had received this letter.

He walked around with it in his breast pocket,

probably walking out into fields and meadows,

which were still then available in Brooklyn,

reading and rereading and rereading it.

NARRATOR: Whitman understood the letter was meant for his eyes only.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a jealous guardian

of his own standing,

careful about whom he anointed in public.

But Whitman's grand project was hanging by a thread.

Leaves of Grass was too dear to Walt,

and too important to the nation he loved,

to adhere to the niceties of social intercourse.

REYNOLDS: He actually had the letter printed

in the New York Tribune,

which, uh... (chuckles) a little suspect there.

And without Emerson's permission.

NARRATOR: Whitman didn't stop there.

With sales sill lagging,

he wrote at least three anonymous and bombastic reviews

of Leaves of Grass.

"He is to prove either the most lamentable of failures

"or the most glorious of triumphs

in the known history of literature," Whitman wrote.

Of himself.

"Here we have a book which fairly staggers us.

An American bard at last!"

For all his manic effort,

sales of Leaves did not improve.

So Whitman simply bent to work on his next hope,

a second edition,

preparing 20 new poems and revising the original 12.

He was desperate to connect.

FOLSOM: Whitman publishes a new poem called "Sun-down Poem,"

and eventually called "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."

He writes:

"It avails not...

"neither time or place.

"Distance avails not.

"I am with you,

"you men and women of a generation,

"or ever so many generations hence.

"I project myself.

"Also I return.

"I am with you

and know how it is."

Whitman places his I,

the I that's been speaking in the present tense,

puts it into the past.

And he puts himself in a past, now,

that is so far past that he's not alive anymore.

And gives over the present tense of the poem

to you and me, to us, the readers.

Whitman, in 1856, was not only imagining us

in 2008 reading this poem,

but projecting us into 2008 to read this poem.

It's as if he is creating us as a character in the poem.

"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."

WHITMAN (dramatized): 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.

ESPADA: My Brooklyn wasn't quite the Brooklyn of Walt Whitman.

At the same time, there's so much I recognize in this.

I certainly recognize,

in Whitman's deep appreciation for the fact that being alive,

my own appreciation for the fact of being alive.

And he's absolutely right.

I see his Brooklyn.

And, strangely enough, I think he saw my Brooklyn.

As different as it was,

there were certainly things in common.

I think about those seagulls.

I saw those seagulls, too.

And, damn, I think they're the same seagulls.

WHITMAN (dramatized): 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 was to know what should come home to me?

Who knows but I am enjoying this?

Who knows but I am as good as looking at you now,

for all you cannot see me?

FOLSOM: What all the preaching in the world,

what all the religions in the world

have been telling you to have faith about:

that there is some sort of life after death,

that it's possible to communicate

across time and across space.

We've just proved it, haven't we?

That we can talk beyond death.

That we can have affection for one another beyond death.

WHITMAN (dramatized): We understand, then, do we not?

What I promised without mentioning it,

have you not accepted?

What the study could not teach,

what the preaching could not accomplish

is accomplished, is it not?

NARRATOR: Within weeks of the publication

of the second edition of Leaves of Grass,

two envoys from Emerson's world,

writers Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott,

made pilgrimage to Brooklyn

to have a look at this Walt Whitman.

And Whitman put on a show.

He invited the men up

to his unkempt attic room where he made

what he called his "pomes" at a rude wooden table.

Thoreau, the man who had lived for seasons in Walden Woods,

was taken aback by Whitman's unmade bed,

a slop jar visible underneath.

Alcott noted with a start the prints of Hercules,

Bacchus and a satyr tacked to the attic wall,

while Whitman bragged about bathing naked

in Coney Island's winter surf.

Walt Whitman was "broad-shouldered,

rouge-fleshed, Bacchus-browed,

bearded like a satyr, and rank," wrote Alcott.

"Eyes gray, unimaginative,

"cautious yet sagacious;

"his voice deep, sharp,

"tender sometimes, and almost melting.

"When talking he will recline upon the couch at length,

"pillowing his head upon his bended arm,

"and informing you, naively, how lazy he is,

and slow."

Whitman's strange pose, as always,

was meant to deflect.

He was the poet of health and glad tidings

and he didn't care to let anybody see beyond that.

In fact, Whitman himself was a master

at denying the uglier facts at hand.

GURGANUS: He's loaded into a house with many, many siblings

many of whom have pathologies which would fill the hour.

He shared the bed

with his profoundly retarded brother,

who overate until he passed out

from ingesting food.

REYNOLDS: His brother Andrew became an alcoholic,

and was married to a woman who became a streetwalker.

His sister Hannah was probably psychotic.

She was very mentally unstable.

His older brother, Jesse--

Walt eventually had to commit him

to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum.

GURGANUS: The more you read about Whitman's family life,

the more you understand why he would prefer

to be riding to and fro,

up and down Broadway again and again.

He had to stay away from home as much as possible.

NARRATOR: In the late 1850s,

Walt liked to jump off the omnibus

at Broadway and Bleecker,

where he could descend among the revelers

at an underground saloon called Pfaff's.

GURGANUS: Pfaff's was the...

Andy Warhol Factory, the Studio 54,

the Algonquin Round Table, all rolled into one.

KARBIENER: It's a place where a lot of the theatrical set winds up.

He's meeting cross-dressers

and all sorts of other edgy types.

It's Bohemia for Whitman.

And he realizes he kind of fits in there.

He-He starts wearing these pants called "bloomers,"

which were the first pants that women wore.

And they were kind of like pantaloons, very fluffy.

But Whitman kind of wore them flamboyantly

and tucked them into his boots,

and, you know, basically, wore women's pants.

GURGANUS: Additionally,

Pfaff's was a place to pick up beautiful young men.

And it's very funny,

in reading some of the earlier histories of Pfaff's,

the heterosexual white guys who are writing,

seemed always to wonder:

why would he go to Pfaff's so often?

Duh! I can tell you why.

It was where all the other outlaws gathered.

WHITMAN (dramatized): One flitting glimpse,

caught through an interstice,

of a youth who loves me

and whom I love,

silently approaching and seating himself near,

that he may hold me by the hand.

And long while,

amid the noises of coming and going,

there we two, content,

happy in being together,

speaking a little, perhaps not a word.

GURGANUS: Of all the young men he met at Pfaff's,

Fred Vaughan, an Irishman,

was the person that he felt closest to.

In the two or three years Whitman lived away from home,

Fred Vaughan was his roommate, was his pal.

WHITMAN (dramatized): And that night,

while all was still,

I heard the waters roll slowly, continually, up the shores.

I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands

as directed to me, whispering, to congratulate me.

For the one I love most lay sleeping by me

under the same cover

in the cool night.

In the autumn moonbeams,

his face was inclined toward me.

And his arm lay lightly around my breast,

and that night I was happy.

Take notice, land of the prairies,

land of the south savannas,

Ohio's land.

Take notice, you Kanuck woods,

and you Lake Huron,

and all that with you roll toward Niagara,

that you each and all find somebody else

to be your singer of songs.

One who loves me is jealous of me,

and withdraws me from all but love.

With the rest, I dispense.

I sever from what I thought would suffice me,

for it does not.

I am indifferent to my own songs.

I will go with him I love.

It is to be enough for us that we are together.

We never separate again.

GURGANUS: Just when Whitman felt closest to him,

and was literally willing to give up his mission

as the great American poet--

imagine, he'd already published Leaves of Grass--

this kid must have had something extraordinary--

Mr. Vaughan decided that he wanted a wife and kids.

He wanted a regular life.

He was tired of lying to his family.

And he moved out.

He said good-bye.

WHITMAN (dramatized): Hours continuing,

long, sore and heavy hearted.

Hours of the dusk when I withdrew

to a lonesome and unfrequented spot.

Seating myself.

Leaning my face in my hands.

Hours sleepless.

Deep in the night,

when I go forth,

speeding swiftly the country roads

or through the city streets.

Or pacing miles and miles,

stifling plaintive cries.

GURGANUS: These are passages in Whitman's life that...

don't make you feel embarrassed for him.

They make you feel closer to him.

Because anybody who hasn't experienced

desertion and heartache is scarcely alive.

And all you can say, in reading those poems,

is that this was one of the great loves of his life.

We don't have images of Fred Vaughan.

We don't know much about him.

But the residue in the poems,

the great chasm in the poems,

make the poetry

some of the most powerful that he ever wrote.

"Sullen and suffering hours!

"I am ashamed, but it is useless.

"I am what I am;

"Hours of my torment.

"I wonder if other men ever have the like,

"out of the like feelings?

"Is there even one other like me--

"distracted, his friend, his lover, lost to him?

"Does he see himself reflected in me?

"In these hours,

does he see the face of his hours reflected?"

NARRATOR: More than three years had passed

since the publication of the second edition of Leaves,

but in the aftermath of the Fred Vaughan affair,

Walt had something he felt compelled

to share with his countrymen--

a simple new human equation for national healing.

"Affection," he wrote,

shall solve every one of the problems of freedom."

In January of 1860,

while Southern States talked of abandoning the Union,

Whitman let it be known

that he was in search of a publisher,

and a Boston firm called Thayer & Eldridge wrote to say

that they wanted to publish

the third edition of Leaves of Grass.

"We can and will sell a large number of copies...

"Try us.

We can do good for you."

Whitman's old swagger returned.

"I feel as if things had taken a turn with me at last,"

Walt wrote to his brother Jeff.

In Boston, preparing the new edition

and its 124 new poems,

Whitman made sure to be seen.

"I create a sensation at Washington Street,"

he crowed.

"Everybody here is so like everybody else.

And I am Walt Whitman."

When the great man himself, Emerson,

took Walt for a walk in a Boston park

and suggested he tone down

the more explicit sexual references,

Walt would have none of it.

"The dirtiest book in all the world," he would later say,

"is the expurgated book."

KARBIENER: The 1860 edition

has two new clusters, as he called them--

the "Calamus" cluster and the "Children of Adam" cluster.

Children of Adam, like the title says,

has a lot to do with heterosexual love.

Procreation is really a featured element

of a lot of the poems.

But the Calamus poems--

man, that is where the energy is.

BILLY COLLINS: "Passing stranger,

you do not know how longingly I look upon you."

KOMUNYAKAA: "You must be he

"I was seeking

"or she I was seeking.

"It comes to be as of a dream.

"You give me the pleasure

"of your eyes, face, flesh as we pass,

"You take of my beard,

breast, hands, in return."

"I am not to speak to you.

"I am to think of you when I sit alone

"or wake at night.

"Alone.

"I am to wait.

"I do not doubt I am to meet you again.

I am to see to it that I do not lose you."

FOLSOM: I think that Whitman believed that

Leaves of Grass was going to prevent a civil war.

I think he had that much faith in the 1860 Leaves of Grass.

As Whitman sees it turn from what everyone

thought would be a two week series of skirmishes

into a brutal and long-lasting war,

he begins to believe that Leaves of Grass

is a failure, is over.

NARRATOR: As the signal national event

of his lifetime unfolded,

Walt Whitman turned from it,

and from poetry.

For the first 18 months of the American Civil War,

he fell into a deep malaise.

He busied himself with a sentimental history

of old Brooklyn,

and occasionally picked fights at Pfaff's.

His connection to the war was his brother, George,

who was fighting with the 51st New York.

Walt followed the 51st in the newspapers,

through its battles at Roanoke Island,

Kelly's Ford, Second Bull Run,

Antietam, and then at Fredericksburg, Virginia,

where on December 13, 1862,

the Union's commanding general had ordered

14 futile attacks against fortified Rebel positions.

When George's name appeared in the casualty lists

in the New York newspapers, just before Christmas of 1862,

Walt headed to the front to find his brother.

FOLSOM: Whitman comes to Fredericksburg

not knowing what he's going to find,

and walks by the mansion

that has been turned into the hospital.

And what he recalls seeing is a pile of severed limbs,

amputated limbs, arms and legs of the soldiers.

And this war becomes for him

a war on the body,

as well as a War Between the States.

NARRATOR: George Whitman was alive and well,

but Walt remained in Fredericksburg

for more than a week, drawing nearer the war each day.

In his small green notebook,

Whitman began recording the sights,

the sounds and the smells of the camp,

and the soldier language of the front.

He walked the charred and denuded landscape

of the now still battlefield,

watched the silent burial teams at work,

pulled back the army-issue blankets

to look on faces of the dead,

and visited with the men who would soon enough be dead.

WHITMAN (dramatized): I do not see that I do much good

to these wounded and dying,

but I cannot leave them.

Once in a while, some youngster holds on to me convulsively,

and I do what I can for him.

At any rate, stop with him and sit near him for hours,

if he wishes it.

NARRATOR: Doctors in the field hospital noticed Whitman,

and asked him to tend to a trainload of casualties

headed north to the capitol.

When a few of the wounded on that train asked

the favor of his company at the hospitals in Washington,

Walt could not refuse.

The hospitals Whitman entered were a primitive business.

Surgeons sharpened knives on their boot soles.

"We knew nothing about antiseptics," wrote one doctor,

and therefore used none."

Infection cut through those wards.

Gangrene cases had to watch as their tissue was eaten away.

The smell was so bad they were often isolated

and left to die alone.

WHITMAN (dramatized): You hear groans or other sounds

of unendurable suffering from two or three cots,

but in the main, there is quiet.

Most of these sick or hurt

are entirely without friend or acquaintances here.

In one of the hospitals I find Thomas Haley,

shot through the lungs, inevitably dying.

The poor fellow is like a frightened animal.

NARRATOR: "What was a man to do?"

Walt would later write.

"There were thousands, tens of thousands,

hundreds of thousands needing me."

GURGANUS: He found a job as a copyist,

and he would work until noon.

Then he would go to the wards from noon until 4:00.

At 4:00, he would go back to the Connors' house.

He would take a bath.

He would refresh himself,

probably take a nap, have a supper.

And then at 6:00, he would return to the ward

and stay from 6:00 to 9:00.

But if a particular soldier wanted his company,

he would stay the night at the hospital

and go directly from the ward to work the next morning.

NARRATOR: In the spring of 1863,

Whitman made his rounds from his small apartment

to his government office building

to the 40 hospitals in and around Washington,

roaming through a nervous city.

Uniformed soldiers peopled the streets,

and bunked down in the capitol

or in the park next to the Washington Monument,

whose construction had stalled at a squat 152 feet.

Completion was no sure thing.

News of General Lee's victory

over the Union forces at Chancellorsville

echoed through the capitol city.

The Rebels were at the gates, for all anyone knew.

WHITMAN (dramatized): The squad of the guard

patrolling about, examining passes,

a sentry at the door,

a cavalryman on horseback

with naked sabre over his shoulder,

like a statue at the corner.

A great white Aladdin's palace

with an unfinished dome,

(reported to be cracking),

The Goddess of Liberty,

meanwhile standing in the mud waiting.

The light falls, falls,

touches the cold white of the great public edifices--

touches with a kind of death-glaze

here and there, the windows of Washington.

NARRATOR: This awful scene, Whitman had come to believe,

was beyond a poet's healing; certainly beyond his healing.

Walt had no plans to make new editions of Leaves of Grass.

He had dedicated himself to his duty in the hospitals.

That was all he had to give.

What hope he still had for the continuation

of America's grand democratic experiment,

he grafted onto a new savior.

"I see the President almost every day," he wrote.

"We have got to where we exchange bows,

"and very cordial ones.

"I never see the man without feeling that he is one

to become personally attached to."

REYNOLDS: Lincoln embodied everything that the I,

the first person of Leaves of Grass, was meant to embody.

He was the average, ordinary, everyday American.

And yet, he was gifted with such eloquence.

He had a kind of poetic side to him.

KARBIENER: Apparently, Walt used to wait in front of the White House

just for a glimpse

of his "Redeemer President," as he called him.

I remember a quote

that "Lincoln was so ugly, he was beautiful."

NARRATOR: Walt may have recognized something of himself

in the stooped shoulders and sad eyes

of the besieged and unpopular president.

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln was under attack

for instituting the first federal income tax

and a military draft.

And for signing the controversial

"Emancipation Proclamation,"

freeing the slaves in any state in rebellion.

Whitman backed him on all of it.

Above all, Walt honored Lincoln's vow to save the Union,

even as the terrible cost

of the President's stubborn will grew.

After every big battle near Washington,

hundreds of wounded a day debarked

at the foot of Sixth Street,

more than a thousand some days.

"The war," Whitman wrote,

"seems to me like a great slaughterhouse,

and the men mutually butchering each other."

WHITMAN (dramatized): When I am present at the most appalling scenes,

deaths, operations, sickening wounds,

perhaps full of maggots,

I do not give out or budge.

But often, hours afterwards,

I feel sick and actually tremble.

Yesterday was the worst,

many with bad and bloody wounds,

inevitably long neglected.

The sight of some cases brought tears to my eyes.

I had the luck yesterday, however, to do some good.

FOLSOM: He would

get dressed up and wash his beard

and all those young soldiers

would call him "old man," even though he was

only 40-some years old at the time.

Because he really did look, as one soldier said,

"like Santa Claus coming through the wards,"

And he was carrying his little bag,

and he would give them candy, and he would give them treats,

and he would take down their requests for small things

that he would go and get.

GURGANUS: His bag contained tobacco aplenty.

And, like a good mother, no child ever got

more than the other child.

He would have notepaper.

He would have jelly.

He would have pens.

He would have pickles.

He would have biscuits, um...

any treat that a soldier could have imagined.

There was a moment when he gave 15 cents

to one of these boys and the boy said,

"I'm gonna buy milk from the milk lady..."

and then burst into tears.

The intensity of that...

sense of encountering the strangers again...

...and feeling tremendous affection for them,

demonstrating that affection.

Many of the soldiers, as they were dying,

the last kiss they would have,

the last moment of affection they would have,

would be from this bearded poet

who had taken time to stop with them.

There were these,

again, moments of what he had learned in New York

to be those moments of urban affection,

that in the hospital became national affection--

all of these soldiers from all over the country,

Southern soldiers as well as Northern soldiers.

There really was a sense in those hospital wards

of Whitman encountering the country,

the entire nation, in a way that he never would

in any other form, in any other setting.

They were all there and he would absorb it all,

show affection for them all.

WHITMAN (dramatized): I have spent a long time

with Oscar F. Wilber, Company G, 154th, New York,

low with chronic diarrhea and a bad wound also.

He talked of death, and said he did not fear it.

He behaved very manly and affectionate.

The kiss I gave him as I was leaving,

he return'd fourfold.

He died a few days after.

NARRATOR: Whitman's efforts in the hospitals--

600 visits, he figured, to more than 100,000 patients--

left him near collapse.

He suffered from insomnia, night sweats, night terrors,

headaches, sore throat, and buzzing in the ears.

Alone with his ailments,

in a spartan third-floor walk-up ten blocks from the White House,

Walt Whitman found strength enough

to extend one final and solemn service

to the soldiers he'd come to know so well.

He opened his notebooks

and began sketching his memorial to them all

in a new book of poetry he called Drum-Taps.

ESPADA: "From the stump of the arm,

"the amputated hand, I undo the clotted lint.

"Remove the slough.

"Wash off the matter and blood.

"Back on his pillow the soldier bends

"with curved neck and side falling head.

"His eyes are closed.

"His face is pale.

"He dares not look on the bloody stump

"and has not yet looked on it.

"I am faithful.

"I do not give out.

"The fractured thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,

"these and more I dress with impassive hand.

"Yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.

"Thus in silence, in dreams' projections,

"Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,

"The hurt and the wounded I pacify with soothing hand,

"I sit by the restless all the dark night...

"Some are so young...

Some suffer so much."

NARRATOR: Walt Whitman completed the manuscript for Drum-Taps

around the time of Lincoln's second inauguration.

A month later, Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox

and the bloody fighting was over.

Whitman's hero president had saved the Union,

and the poet was convinced

Abraham Lincoln could repair the national breach.

Five days after the surrender, on Good Friday,

Walt was back home in Brooklyn with his family.

George was finally home, too, after four years at war.

Jeff was prospering.

Drum-Taps was ready for the printer.

An early bloom of daffodils, hyacinths, and tulips

scented Portland Avenue,

and there, at his mother's house,

Whitman received news

of the last sad casualty of the long war.

REYNOLDS: Southerners as well as Northerners

were stunned and were, on some level, grieved

by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

So Lincoln becomes, in death, in a sense,

a greater version of what he had been in life.

COLLINS: "Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,

"Through day and night,

"with the great cloud darkening the land,

"With the pomp of the inloop'd flags,

"with the cities draped in black,

"With the show of the States themselves,

"as of crape-veil'd women, standing,

"With processions long and winding,

"and the flambeaus of the night,

"With the countless torches lit--

with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads."

REYNOLDS: Walt Whitman, who, above all, had been searching

for unity, comradeship, togetherness,

feels that in the death of Abraham Lincoln

we finally have that kind of unity

that America had lacked before that.

The unity that is finally achieved

and that Whitman's early poetry could-couldn't--

tried to achieve but never could.

WHITMAN (dramatized): Then there is a cement to the whole people,

subtle, more underlying,

than any thing in written constitution,

or courts, or armies.

Namely, the cement of a death identified thoroughly

with that people, at its head,

and for its sake.

Strange, is it not,

that battles, martyrs, agonies,

blood, even assassination,

should so condense,

perhaps only really, lastingly condense,

a Nationality.

FOLSOM: It's only going to be after the Civil War

that he is going to begin

to re-conceive and re-imagine Leaves of Grass

so radically that, after the Civil War,

he would actually say, at one point,

that the Civil War is the very heart and the center

of Leaves of Grass around which the book works.

In the 1867 edition, he actually sews in--

I think of it as an act of suturing--

Drum-Taps, the Civil War poem,

into the back of Leaves of Grass.

And, in that act, he has made the decision

that Leaves of Grass is large enough,

absorptive enough, broad enough

to absorb this national disaster,

and what new life, now, for America,

can possibly grow out of it.

NARRATOR: The war completed Leaves of Grass

and put a period on an era.

Walt Whitman spent many of the following 25 years

confined to a small house he bought in Camden, New Jersey,

while the country the poet had so lovingly absorbed

faded from view.

Post-war America eluded Whitman's grasp;

what grew from the Civil War disappointed.

Whitman added little to Leaves of Grass

in the long years after the war.

He tinkered and edited,

pulled some of the more revealing Calamus poems,

attached small addenda.

The aging poet suffered a series of strokes.

His legs failed him, his lungs withered,

abscesses surrounded his heart.

One growth eroded a rib,

leaving him in excruciating pain.

He had an enlarged prostate, a fatty liver, and a gallstone.

KARBIENER: At the end of the 1880s, he was wheelchair-bound

and really found one side of his body completely paralyzed.

So this was a man on all fronts, you know--

intellectual, political, personal--

saw some debilitating changes.

WHITMAN (dramatized): Approaching,

nearing, curious,

thou dim uncertain specter--

bringest thou life or death?

Strength, weakness, blindness,

more paralysis and heavier?

Or placid skies and sun?

Wilt stir the waters yet

or haply cut me short for good?

Or leave me here as now,

Dull, parrot-like and old,

with crack'd voice harping, screeching?

KARBIENER: You have poems that are complaining

about old age and about cricketiness

and, you know, he even writes about his body's condition.

You learn he's got diarrhea, you know,

but to him that's important.

He's putting his body on paper.

But there's something else, too.

There's... there's an idea

that there's something beyond the body.

It's as if he knows he's got to leave that shell behind,

and yet there's something to look forward to, also.

WHITMAN (dramatized): Ah, whispering,

something again unseen.

Where late this heated day

thou enterest at my window.

Thou laving, tempering all,

cool-freshing,

gently vitalizing.

Me, old,

alone, sick,

weak-down, melted,

worn with sweat.

Thou, nestling,

folding close and firm yet soft.

Companion better than talk,

book,

art.

ESPADA: What's striking to me

is how he lets down his guard

and how he honestly expresses himself

as a... a sick, old man,

grateful for a moment's breeze

which may or may not be indicative

of something out there in the universe.

WHITMAN (dramatized): So sweet thy primitive taste

to breathe within.

Thy soothing fingers on my face and hands.

Thou, messenger, magical strange bringer

to body and spirit of me.

Distances balked,

occult medicines penetrating me

from head to foot.

I feel the sky,

the prairies vast.

I feel the mighty northern lakes,

I feel the ocean and the forest,

somehow I feel the globe itself

swift swimming in space.

Thou blown from lips so loved,

now gone haply from endless store,

God-sent.

For thou art spiritual, Godly.

Minister to speak to me, here and now,

what word has never told and cannot tell,

hast thou no soul?

Can I not know,

identify thee?

NARRATOR: Walt Whitman died in Camden, New Jersey,

in 1892.

His life's work, Leaves of Grass,

which he had tended obsessively for 35 years,

through seven separate editions,

had grown from 95 pages and 12 poems

to 400 pages and more than 300 poems.

No wife survived him, and no children;

he left his most cherished possession,

Leaves of Grass, to anyone who would have it.

WHITMAN (dramatized): I depart as air.

I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt

to grow from the grass I love.

If you want me again,

look for me under your boot soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

but I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

and filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged,

missing me one place, search another.

I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

ANNOUNCER: Stay tuned for scenes

from the next American Experience.

But first...

There's more about Walt Whitman at American Experience on-line.

Visit Whitman's New York,

consider the qualities of a national poet,

and watch the program on-line.

All this and more at pbs.org.

American Experience's "Walt Whitman"

is available on DVD.

To order, call PBS Home Video at:

Or visit us on-line at shopPBS.org.

Next time on American Experience...

On the field, he could do it all.

ANNOUNCER: The greatest right fielder in the game of baseball,

Roberto Clemente.

But off it, he endured racism and ridicule.

MAN: He was a man who was standing up for what is right.

They weren't ready for Roberto Clemente.

The story of a legend whose greatness transcended sports.

MAN: He is one of those iconic figures that lift the spirits.

"Roberto Clemente," on American Experience.

Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org

American Experience is made possible by:

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Tell yourself as it gets cold,

and gray falls from the air

that you will go on walking,

hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself--

inside the dome of dark

or under the cracking white of the moon's gaze

in a valley of snow.

Tonight as it gets cold

tell yourself what you know, which is nothing

but the tune your bones play as you keep going.

And you will be able for once to lie down under the small fire

of winter stars.

And if it happens that you cannot go on

or turn back

and you find yourself where you will be at the end,

tell yourself in that final flowing

of cold through your limbs

that you love what you are.

Not you alone, proud truths of the world!

Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science!

But myths and fables of eld-- Asia's, Africa's fables!

The far-darting beams of the spirit!

The unloos'd dreams!

The deep diving bibles and legends;

The daring plots of the poets,

the elder religions;

O you temples fairer than lilies,

pour'd over by the rising sun!

O you fables, spurning the known,

eluding the hold of the known,

mounting to heaven!

You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled,

red as roses, burnish'd with gold!

Towers of fables immortal,

fashion'd from mortal dreams!

You too I welcome,

and fully, the same as the rest;

You too with joy I sing.

Passage to India!

Lo, soul!

Seest thou not God's purpose from the first?

The earth to be spann'd,

connected by network.

The races, neighbors,

to marry and be given in marriage.

The oceans to be cross'd, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.

A worship new, I sing;

You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours!

You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours!

You, not for trade or transportation only.

But in God's name,

and for thy sake, O soul.

as I was ricocheting slowly The other day,

off the blue walls of this room,

bouncing from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

I found myself in the "L" section

of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word "lanyard."

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

could send one more suddenly into the past.

A past where I sat at a workbench, at a camp,

by a deep Adirondack lake,

learning how to braid thin plastic strips

into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if that's what you did with them.

(laughter)

But that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand,

again and again,

until I had made a boxy, red and white lanyard

for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

(laughter)

She nursed me in many a sick room,

lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,

set cold facecloths on my forehead,

then led me out into the airy light,

and taught me to walk and swim.

And I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

(laughter)

"Here are thousands of meals," she said,

"and here is clothing and a good education."

(laughter)

"And here is your lanyard," I replied.

(louder laughter)

"Which I made with a little help

from a counselor."

"Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

"strong legs, bones and teeth,

"and two clear eyes to read the world," she whispered.

"And here," I said, "is the lanyard I made at camp."

(laughter)

And here, I wish to say to her now,

is a smaller gift-- not the archaic truth

that you can never repay your mother,

but the rueful admission

that when she took the two-toned lanyard

from my hands, I was as sure as a boy could be

that this useless, worthless thing

I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

(applause)