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