American Experience (1988–…): Season 20, Episode 11 - Walt Whitman - full transcript

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?

Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
Public shouldn't leave reviews for lawyers.

? ?

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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.

American Experience's
"Walt Whitman"

is available on DVD.

To order,
call PBS Home Video at:

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.

American Experience
is made possible by:

to enhance public understanding
of the role of technology.

The foundation also seeks
to portray the lives

of the men and women engaged
in scientific

and technological pursuit.

Major corporate funding is
provided by Liberty Mutual.

Throughout history,
ordinary people

have considered it
their responsibility

to do something extraordinary.

Liberty Mutual-- proud sponsor
of American Experience.

This program has been made
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is also made possible

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and by contributions
to your PBS station from:

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)