Note sull'episodio
He invented the modern book blurb by stamping a private letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson in gold on his spine without permission, and after his death his brain was accidentally dropped and destroyed at an anthropometric society in Philadelphia. This episode strips away the marble statue to find the restless hustler behind Walt Whitman, from a financially unstable Long Island and Brooklyn childhood, a kiss from the Marquis de Lafayette, and leaving school at eleven to become a printer's devil who learned to see words as physical objects.
We follow his erratic early career, the temperance novel Franklin Evans he wrote in three days while drinking, the pseudonymous men's health guide advocating cold baths and nude sunbathing, and the 1855 self-published Leaves of Grass with its open-collared engraving and no author name on the title page. Then we trace the Civil War search for his brother George, his years as a volunteer nurse in Washington hospitals, his firing from the Interior Department over the book, William Douglas O'Connor's Good Gray Poet pamphlet, his coded journals about Peter Doyle, the claim of six illegitimate children, and the deathbed edition and granite mausoleum he micromanaged to the end.
- How typesetting shaped his understanding of language on the page
- Hack writing for money before finding his voice
- King James cadence and Italian opera as the twin sources of his free verse
- The Emerson letter as the boldest marketing move of the era
- Field hospitals, the assassination elegies, and the carefully managed public persona