Often referred to as the first great American poet, Walt Whitman remains a towering figure in American literature more than 200 years after his birth. In Search of Walt Whitman - The Early Years (1819–1860), a documentary from East Rock Films and director Andrew D. Kaplan, does a commendable job bringing the poet's work into focus through the prism of his lived experience.
Given that Whitman was born during the administration of James Monroe, he can in many ways feel less knowable as a person than more contemporary poets broadly considered part of the American poetic canon, such as Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, or Mary Oliver.
In particular, the educational movie, which focuses on the early years of Whitman’s career, probes the intersection of his life and work to discover what made him a uniquely American poet and not simply a great poet.
Whitman grew up in a fledgling nation that became inextricable from his work, whether he was writing about other contemporary artists (he loved the opera), casting New York into vivid poetic imagery, recording his impressions of slavery in America, or pondering the significance of the Civil War. (The latter event is only briefly mentioned in this movie, but serves as a jumping-off point for the second installment in the series.)
In Search of Walt Whitman offers an opportunity to teach with movies, seeking not to explain his poems but to contextualize them and provide a background that offers a starting place for a deeper understanding of his work. Many of those poems are excerpted within the film, read aloud with text on the screen. However, the primary focus is the poet’s life and not parsing the poems themselves.
It further explores events that wouldn't directly impact his poems, but are part of the framework required to understand him, such as Whitman’s reaction to hearing Ralph Waldo Emerson speak about the country’s need for a poet of its time and place, how he struggled to find an audience for his poetry, his reputation for “loafing” (later echoed in “Song of Myself”), and how he took inspiration from his work as a journalist.
While the documentary is rich with history and context, it sidesteps criticizing Whitman. In particular, it takes “I Sing the Body Electric” at face value as a reaction to seeing ads for slave auctions in the paper for which he worked in New Orleans. The documentary does not dip its toes into the relatively recent discussions of instances in which Whitman espoused overtly racist views.
“I continue to question if Whitman was using his poems to hide his true self or if his poems represented the person he wanted to be? The Walt Whitman who confessed his ill-conceived if not deliberate misunderstandings of science to [his biographer] Traubel seemed breathtakingly different from the author of ‘I Sing the Body Electric,’” the poet CA Conrad wrote for the Poetry Foundation in 2015. Recommended.
Would public libraries benefit from adding this Walt Whitman Biographical documentary?
The documentary may not have big-screen entertainment appeal, but it would certainly be a beneficial complement to the collection of public libraries looking to bolster their holdings with regard to movies about poets, biographies of major American figures, or American literary history.
The educational film offers educators a movie that nicely complements a look into Whitman's most well-know early poems. However, some educators may be frustrated by the movie’s reluctance to dive into what Whitman scholars have refered to as his “unstable and inconsistent” “racial attitudes.”
Could writing programs benefit from screening this Walt Whitman biographical documentary?
Whether in high school or college, In Search of Walt Whitman - The Early Years does the work of connecting Walt Whitman’s biography to his work. While it doesn’t attempt to dive into the poems themselves, it brings context in a relatively entertaining, if sometimes dry, manner that places his work alongside his life in an easy-to-understand, linear fashion.