♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Major support for "Poetry in America" provided by the Dalio Foundation.

Additional support provided by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of "Poetry" magazine, and an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

And by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

And from Deborah Hayes Stone and Max Stone.

♪ ♪ ARIANA LORELEI SMITH: "I celebrate myself "and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

It first feels like it's going to be like a poem about self-affirmation.

But at the same time, Walt Whitman is kind of merging himself and the reader together.

ADRIENE RAPHEL: I think of that famous picture of the young Whitman with his hat.

He's standing really jauntily.

But he's a very inviting figure.

He's me, he's you, he's everybody.

He's just fearless.

He's not ashamed of his body.

He's not ashamed of his soul.

MATTHEW AUCOIN: You can go pages and pages and be thinking, why is this man shouting at me?

Someone make him stop.

And then suddenly you seem to be looking at your own diary entry.

JOSHUA BENNETT: He's creating a readership.

"If you, dear reader, happen to be reading me years from now, a century from now, know that I thought of you."

He's like my guide into the past.

KAREN KARBIENER: On these very streets where we're standing, where he walked with his black hat and his black outfit, he's putting together the idea of a new American poetry, right?

A raw, radical, street-level poetry.

♪ ♪ ELISA NEW: This radicalism of Walt Whitman surely contributes to why, 200 years after his birth, he remains the most important and influential of American poets.

Whitman's first edition of "Leaves of Grass," for which he set the type and worked the press himself in 1855, was unlike anything published in the 19th century.

Unrhymed, filling every page and spilling beyond margins, the 12 poems of this edition ran to 95 pages.

In subsequent editions, Whitman added titles and numbered sections, but new poems and revisions of older sections were simply incorporated into the original until the final 1891 edition of "Leaves of Grass" had grown to 438 pages.

A great prairie of print, the work was meant from the start to suggest the scale and greatness of the new growing democracy.

In his preface to the 1855 edition, Whitman declaims, "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem."

By the middle of the 19th century, when all of these incredibly great writers begin to appear-- Emerson, Melville, and Whitman, you know, it gives you the sense how enormous these people were.

I mean, how huge their thinking was.

Whatever it is that made that happen, I think it was democracy.

NEW: To read Whitman with me, I gathered a diverse group of interpreters-- nine poets of all ages: a printer, two teachers, a hip-hop artist, a composer of operas, three opera singers, a playwright, and a Supreme Court Justice.

A big group for one half-hour of TV, but to feel the largeness of Whitman, you have to be part of a crowd.

(cheers and applause, fireworks exploding) And nowhere in 1855 was the fact of the crowd more apparent than on the streets of New York City.

♪ ♪ ELENA KAGAN: For a New Yorker, nothing ever is like New York, right?

There's only one city like New York, at least in this country, and every other city seems like not really a city.

And so then it makes you think of, what is a city?

NEW: "See steamers steaming through my poem.

- Yeah.

NEW: "See, in my poem, cities solid, vast, inland, with paved streets."

BENNETT: Brings to mind poetry made to the measure of the world.

I think about the steamer steaming through the poem.

I mean the poem's as big as the earth.

(engine idling, distant chatter) NAS: "The blab of the pave, the tires of carts "and sluff of bootsoles and talk of the promenaders."

(people chattering, bike bell chimes) CHIN: "The heavy omnibus, "the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor."

The sounds, the sounds of the city.

(people chattering, loud thumping) Every line there's something interesting.

It's sonically vibrant.

Describing the granite floor sounds so much heavier, you know, than like the blab of the pave, and then that's, you know, the clank of the shod horses sounds a lot different than sluff of bootsoles.

When I hear it, I get this picture in my head.

NEW: Right.

JONES: And it's like, wow.

(distant voices, bustling city sounds) BENNETT: "Crowds of men and women "attired in the usual costumes!

how curious you are to me!"

It's that sort of classic New York City shot, the milling crowds of Manhattan, though for him it's Brooklyn as well.

KARBIENER: For a lot of urbanites, you don't need a destination.

The journey through the streets is the destination.

So you let things happen to you.

NEW: Yeah.

KARBIENER: Because things are always happening.

Whitman used this phrase "absorb and translate," NEW: Ah, absorb... - And I feel like that's what a city person really does, right?

You can't take everything in, but you're sort of like sponging in all of these people.

CHRISTINA DAVIS: "For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you."

And it's like that Richard Feynman line in physics about, "I am a universe of atoms and an atom in the universe.

"Every atom that is in you is being breathed into me and expired out into you."

BENNETT: Our motion is what makes us.

Not necessarily the brick and mortar, not the property, not the house, but those moments where we are more fluid.

NEW: And in that fluidity, we share each other's space.

And we blur together.

We blur together and then we become distinct.

♪ ♪ But Whitman's vision of urban multiplicity is also grounded in the natural image of grass, announced in his work's title.

Like humans in the city, grass is both singular and plural... (birds chirping) Each blade distinct, but part of something larger.

MARK DOTY: We don't usually talk about grass having leaves, so if grass has leaves, then grass is just one thing.

Grass is like one plant with many, many leaves, one way to think of it.

Another, of course, is the leaves of the book, that these are leaves that are being turned.

These are the pages of the poem.

RAPHEL: "I loafe and invite my soul.

"I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass."

DAVIS: The speaker is gradually lowering.

From the opening moment of the poem, it's "I," and then it descends to the grass.

RAPHEL: He's laying in the grass, too.

And you can't see the grass is in little spears until you're that close and observing it.

And you're right down there with the grass itself.

♪ ♪ SMITH: The connotation of the word "loafe" gives that reader that, "I'm relaxed, so therefore you should be relaxed, too."

BENNETT: The soul is made to lie in the grass.

The grass is the space where we can commune with the divine, the divine within ourselves and being out in nature.

(birds chirping) DOTY: Grass is transient, grass is organic, is part of this mortal moment.

♪ ♪ NEW: "I believe in you my soul... "the other I am must not abase itself to you, "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."

Why do you think body and soul need to make love here?

Whitman's poems remind us that we live in flesh and blood, right?

We're not just ideas without a body.

(sighs) It's an affirmation of being on this earth in the material world.

It is far from any Christian vision, but it's absolutely radiant about the joy of being flesh... and being flesh together.

♪ ♪ NEW: Whitman apprenticed to a Brooklyn printer at the age of 12.

It was work that would eventually launch him into the world of journalism and poetry.

DOTY: The word "grass" was printers' slang in the 19th century for the kinds of, um, nonsense things or... NEW: Filler.

DOTY: Filler.

And so we could view "Leaves of Grass" as being these tossed off pages, these things that you shouldn't take too seriously.

ROBERT WARNER: This printing press is manually operated by pumping with the foot.

- Mm-hmm.

So my one leg is much bigger, 19 years later, than my other.

(laughter) It also has more hair.

KARBIENER: Really?

NEW: Because it's... WARNER: Yeah, so they're decidedly different.

So printers are very asymmetric in their form.

KARBIENER: You're talking about a man who is incredibly hands-on with literature, because for him, writing a book wasn't just sort of like an intellectual process.

NEW: That's right.

KARBIENER: It was actually making the book, being bodily involved in it.

(sawing wood, hammering sounds) NEW: The son of a house builder, Whitman identified with men who worked in the manual trades, who used tools to build the infrastructure of the city.

Whitman's full-body portraits of Americans at work-- black, white, men, women-- show labor itself as ennobling.

BENNETT: "The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses.

"the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain, "The negro that drives the long dray of the stoneyard... "steady and tall he stands "poised on one leg on the stringpiece.

"His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hipband."

This man is sort of a sculpted ideal.

I'm thinking about Apollo, sort of the horses riding across the sun in the skies.

They're the butchers or they're the blacksmiths, they're the farmers and the workers, these are the people he chooses to give this elevated language to.

That's quite incredible; I mean, it's a political and an aesthetic commitment.

(woman singing opera) BLOKH: "The pure contralto sings in the organloft, "the carpenter dresses his plank, "the tongue of his foreplane "whistles its wild ascending lisp."

Note the kind of play with sound that's happening in these two lines, because they're very different sounds.

There's the whistling of the tongue of the foreplane, but also the song of the contralto.

(singing in Italian) RAPHEL: We have this pure contralto sings in the organloft.

(singing continues) That allows the carpenter's plank to become a tongue, and that tongue can then whistle its lisp.

(singing in Italian) (wood shaving) BLOKH: Whitman is comparing different kinds of labor and kind of equalizing them through how they're juxtaposed.

Whitman, by using this list form, he's trying to say that they're all equal.

(woman singing in Italian) SMITH: People of different backgrounds are adjacent to each other.

And they may be experiencing very different things, but they're still all adjacent, just like the whole poem, right?

Everything's happening together at the same time.

♪ ♪ (horn honks) NEW: Whitman's journalist's eye sweeps the whole panorama of pre-Civil War New York.

But he turns his gaze to the future as well.

In the 1856 edition, he added a poem eventually called "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."

"I am with you, you men and women of a generation, "or ever so many generations hence, "just as you feel "when you look on the river and sky, so I felt."

KAGAN: It's like, oh look at that, other people have been staring at that view for over 100 years, 150 years almost.

So reading this made me kind of think a little bit harder about what I was seeing every day.

- Mmm.

- Great poetry can do that, make you notice things that you don't notice in the world.

(water rushing) BENNETT: He's imagining this sort of future public.

He brings the audience in this democratic impulse to say, "Well, no matter what we have been or what we are now, what can we be?"

And he's letting that next generation know, that's not even here yet, that he's thinking of them.

KAGAN: That's kind of great and it's great to think of a poet thinking in that way because usually one thinks of poets as a little bit more individualists and solitary.

DAVID KRAVITZ: ♪ I...

I... ♪ ♪ I... ♪ ♪ Hear the chorus ♪ ♪ It is a grand-opera ♪ AUCOIN: What he absorbed from being around opera is a sense that if you go for the most spectacular and over-the-top and potentially stupid-looking thing within the walls of your theater or the boundaries of your page, which you spill over, if you're Walt Whitman, you have a shot at achieving this uncanny intimacy.

(stringed instruments playing) ♪ It sails ♪ AUCOIN: It's always a strange moment in a great opera performance when the voice breaks through all the artifice and all the silliness, and it seems to be speaking directly to you.

♪ ♪ NEW: Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" develops through the 1850s amid growing animosity between North and South.

The poet's handwritten edits show his unquenched belief that the states might remain united.

♪ ♪ BLOKH: "A southerner soon as a northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable."

DOTY: "Growing among black folks as among white, "Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressmen, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same."

"I give them the same," who says that?

DAVÓÓNE TINES: ♪ Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel ♪ ♪ Deliver Daniel, deliver Daniel ♪ ♪ Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel ♪ ♪ Then why not every man?

♪ NEW: In response to the passing of the 1854 Fugitive Slave Law, that criminalized assisting escaped slaves, Whitman crafts a moving tableau of human empathy.

NAS: "The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside, "I heard his motions crackling twigs on the woodpile, "Through the swung half-door of the kitchen "I saw him limpsey and weak, "and went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him."

I'm a details guy, so I like the beginning, like, "I heard his motions crackling the twigs on the woodpile."

Then you see him through the swung half-door of the kitchen.

This kind of puts you through his POV, you see, you know, he's giving you a lot in there.

"And brought water and filled the tub "for his sweated body and bruised feet "and gave him a room that entered from my own and gave him some coarse clean clothes."

KUSHNER: What's really moving about the great writers, Emerson and Melville and Whitman, this ability to, at a time of such incredibly intense partisan fervor, they have a discomfort with partisan politics, the inability to sort of cauterize human feeling at the Mason-Dixon line.

♪ ♪ BENNETT: You're not necessarily divided by race or ethnicity or nation in the way we might think.

And he makes the argument instead that man has this rich interior universe.

♪ ♪ NAS: "And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness."

He must be scared to death.

He doesn't really know if he can trust this guy and this guy's like, "I don't know "what kind of trouble I'm gonna get in with you, but, you know, come in and stay."

AUCOIN: Whitman was obsessed with the level of the individual.

It's about one-on-one contact.

JONES: "He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north, I had him sit next to me at table, my firelock leaned in the corner."

NEW: Making its case both for freedom and equality, Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" shows too how the romance of individual liberty can fuel oppression and inequality.

Even before the Civil War, Whitman sees the costs for Native peoples of westward expansion.

SMITH: "Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt, "Wandering amazed at my own likeness and glee, "Kindling a fire and broiling the freshkilled game, My eyes settle the land..." KUSHNER: At the beginning of the 19th century, there was already a great deal of thinking about what lay on the other side of the Louisiana Purchase and Manifest Destiny and westward expansion.

♪ ♪ Melville called it spreading like a weedy grass, which is an almost Whitman-esque image.

♪ ♪ LINDA HOGAN: "On a bank lounged the trapper.

"He was dressed mostly in skins.

"His luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck.

"One hand rested on his rifle... the other hand held firmly the wrist of the red girl," The trapper seems very successful, very beautiful, golden locks.

He's settling the land, but they've been unsettled and they've had their everything lost.

They probably don't want her to be married to this trapper.

And, clearly, she doesn't really want to.

He's holding her tight like she's going to get away.

How much agency could she have in this transaction?

I mean, realistically...

I mean, how much agency could any woman have in this time period, right?

♪ ♪ ALEXANDRA CONTRERAS-MONTESANO: "The prostitute draggles "her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck.

"The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths.

"The president holds a cabinet counsel, he is surrounded by the great secretaries."

It's lyrical that they're placed near each other.

The prostitute and the president because the words might even sound similar, but their connotations are so different.

The president is selling his ideas, selling his policies to people, while the prostitute is forced to sell her body.

♪ ♪ BENNETT: "The squaw, wrapped in her yellow-hemmed cloth "is offering moccasins and beadbags for sale, "The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with halfshut eyes bent sideways."

There we're being forced to think about the ways that oppressed peoples are made to sell images of themselves back to the people that exploit them.

CHIN: He's not afraid to be all-inclusive.

In his messiness, there's beauty, ugliness.

His job as a poet, I mean, I don't know that he would have articulated this way to himself, but his job as a poet is to make himself open to this continent of dissonant voices.

♪ ♪ RAPHEL: "The groups of newly-come immigrants "cover the wharf or levee.

"The woollypates hoe in the sugarfield, "the overseer views them from his saddle.

"The bugle calls in the ballroom.

"The gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other."

♪ ♪ RAPHEL: That's an amazing moment of... the same motion covering different, totally different classes, different races.

♪ ♪ We have people flooding into the United States.

We have the slaves sort of flooding across the fields.

These upper classes in this dance of society in the ballroom.

Putting them all in the same type of motion and sort of seeing them from the same distance... Whitman doesn't let anybody off the hook at all, even though he's simultaneously generous to everybody, but everybody gets under his scrutiny.

♪ ♪ BENNETT: The labor and the violence of the sugar field makes what's happening in the ballroom possible.

And it brings to mind that famous line from Emerson, that there's blood in the sugar, there's blood in the tea, blood in the coffee, right?

That this moment of delight and leisure, its foundation is the exploited labor of the immigrants, is the violence waged against the slave.

That poem is also about human value, chattel slavery as a kind of mockery of the infinite human value that we all have.

NEW: Whitman's manuscripts of 1860 to '61 show his growing fear that the ideals he'd propounded in "Leaves of Grass" would not keep his country from civil war.

(weapon fire, explosions) TINES: ♪ Were you there ♪ ♪ When they crucified ♪ ♪ My Lord?

♪ ♪ Were you there... ♪ NEW: When his brother George was reported wounded, Whitman left New York for the battlefields of Virginia and the hospital wards of Washington, D.C. (Tines vocalizing) NEW: As nurse to the wounded and eyewitness to his nation's suffering, Whitman would become a different poet... TINES: ♪ To tremble... ♪ NEW: ...and his "Leaves of Grass" a deeper, greater work of lyric tenderness and epic scope.

♪ Were you there ♪ ♪ When they crucified my Lord?

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Major support for "Poetry in America" provided by the Dalio Foundation.

Additional support provided by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of "Poetry" magazine, and an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

And by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

And from Deborah Hayes Stone, and Max Stone.

For additional information and steaming content, please visit us at poetryinamerica.org