Watch American Experience: Walt Whitman Online
Mercredi, septembre 1st, 2010 |
Watch American Experience: Walt Whitman Online.
Movie Title: American Experience: Walt Whitman American Experience: Walt Whitman is available for streaming or downloading. Click Here to Stream or Download American Experience: Walt Whitman |
No need to overly intellectualize the strengths and weaknesses of this documentary about Walt Whitman. For the newcomer to his work, for the reader of his work who doesn’t know much about his life, this American Experience biography provides more than enough to deepen our understanding of Whitman and take a moment to appreciate his greatness. Despite being a PBS production (I can hear young people yawning) this video has a refreshingly light touch and doesn’t smother Whitman’s work and life with complex layers of analysis. What we get, instead, is a sense of the real world that infused itself into Whitman’s spirit as a man and as an artist.
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Chris Cooper’s narration of Whitman’s poems is a highlight of this video. The words sound so natural, so relaxed and yet so full of feeling that they sound as though he could have written the poems himself. The music throughout the documentary has a very natural feeling that enhances but never overpowers the scenes.
More than anything, this documentary makes you grateful for Whitman’s gifts to our cultural heritage. The great poet hoped that his “Leaves of Grass” could heal a nation tragically fractured by Civil War. We read his poems now, in our own fraught times, and realize - for good and for ill - that not much about man’s essential place in the world has really changed since Whitman’s times; that we still possess an unrealized hope for peace and joy and eternal love.
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Recommended to anyone interested in what “American” really means.
Sure, it is always appropriate to thumb through the pages of the 19th century poet laureate of democracy Walt Whitman’s “Leaves Of Grass”. After wading through Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier and the other Brahmin and Brahmin wannabe poets who dominate the 19th century `aristocratic’ European-influenced American poetic academy old white-bearded Walt is like a breath of fresh air. And let’s put it this way, while everyone has, and should, take a peek at those other 19th century poets, if no other reason that to compare work, it is old Walt that those of us in the 21st century WANT to read. Therefore, it is appropriate that PBS’s “American Experience in 2008 produce a documentary that is, while filled with biographic information, centered on Whitman’s long struggle to produce his masterpiece, “Leaves Of Grass”.
This documentary does yeoman’s service in setting the context in which Walt Whitman had to work including the trials and tribulations of his long suffering over his troubled working class family affairs; his free-wheeling experiences in breaking out of the family and establishing himself as a newspaper writer in New York City; his invention of himself as a proto-hippie in that city’s bohemian milieu: his various, mainly homosexual, romantic experiences that eventually find themselves noted heavily throughout his master work; his dramatic and traumatic Civil War time nursing services to the Union wounded; the shock of Lincoln’s death; and, his post-war struggles to expand and deepen his poetic works. That sets the pace for the many `talking head’ academic commentaries about the meaning of Whitman’s work, his place as the poetic, warts and all, 19th century democratic champion of the fragile American republican experience, and the breakthrough nature of his more or less explicit sexual, erotic and homoerotic passages in his work.
Finally, poets like other types of writers, run through period of fashion and neglect. My recent road back to an appreciation of Whitman is a case in point. I have been running through (again) and reviewing the work of the 1950s “beat” writer Jack Kerouac (himself the subject of the vicissitudes of fashion) in this space. Kerouac makes clear (as do many other writers and poets) that Whitman’s poems, his lifestyle and his championship of the “common man” deeply influenced him in his early formative days as he struggled to write. That is a common story when the name Walt Whitman comes up. So if you need a little refresher on Whitman this well-done documentary fills the bill. But, really, go read some of the poems
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