Walt Whitman

Because I'm a history classic lit geek I squealed with delight when I turned on "The American Experience" on PBS the other night and the episode was all about Walt Whitman and the many volumes of "the Leaves of Grass".

Walt, was a Long Islander much like myself and growing up on the Long Island you really don't learn that much about Walt and his poetry. All the Babylon Schools told us about Walt was he was born on Long Island, lived in Brooklyn and wrote poems and he may or may not have passed through Babylon Village, that's the town on LI were I grew up. And there is a mall named for him and a Walt Whitman High School in Huntington and Huntington Station all near were he was born on Long Island.

I first read the first copy of "The Leaves of Grass" when I was about 12 years old after I saw the film "Dead Poets Society" and also my curiosity about the name sake of the Walt Whitman mall got the best of me too. I just remember being completely enamored of the way he wrote about New York. Because in a lot of ways that was the same way that I saw New York some 130 years later.

And this episode of "American Experience" pointed that out, that the way Walt saw New York was the same way that many people today in 2008 still look at New York. The episode also pointed out how erotic some of the poems in the later editions of "The Leaves of Grass" were a lot of the poems dealt with having romances and sex with both men and women. The later editions were pretty controversial stuff at the time because of not only the sexual references but also because many of the poems were anti-slavery and anti-war and Whitman also spoke about Eastern religions and Eastern philosophy. No wonder why they didn't want to teach us his poetry in school!
He was really someone who was ahead of his time and his work was really criticized because of that. The Walt Whitman "American Experience" was an interesting look at a real New York character, New York at Walt Whitman's time and poems that are still really relevant today in 2008.

The episode really made me want to re-read the first edition of the "Leaves of Grass" and all the other editions of "The Leaves of Grass".

I found this website that has snippets and a background on the poems of "Leaves of Grass" and Walt Whitman, check it out for yourselves! And the Walt Whitman episode of "The American Experience" is worth sitting down to watch when it comes on PBS.

http://www.leavesofgrass.org/