Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass, wrote his own anonymous rave reviews in newspapers to promote it, and spent decades revising and expanding the book that reinvented American poetry. He was a self-taught printer, journalist, and shameless self-promoter who created a new kind of verse — free, democratic, erotic, and sprawling — that captured the American voice in a way no poet had before or has matched since.
This episode traces Whitman from his working-class Brooklyn childhood through the self-published first edition, the Civil War nursing that transformed him, and the decades of revision that turned Leaves of Grass from a slim pamphlet into the American epic.
Whitman's working-class origins and the journalism career that preceded his poetry
The self-published first edition of Leaves of Grass and the fake reviews he wrote to promote it
The Civil War hospital work that broke his health and deepened his poetry
The lifetime of revisions, the Emerson endorsement, and Whitman's place as America's founding poet
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