Product Details

• Format: Color, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Winstar
• VHS Release Date: March 21, 2000
• Run Time: 60 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: 1572527986
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #120,305 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

The artist who revolutionized American poetry gets the full Voices & Visions treatment here, with a full-bearded actor reading his work, reenactments of Civil War camp scenes, and poets Allen Ginsberg, Galway Kinnell, and Donald Hall lauding his contributions to their genre. Best known for "Leaves of Grass" (made famous again by the Clinton administration), Whitman was the first American poet to openly address the beauty of the human body and sexuality. Narrator Peter MacNicol spends 54 minutes tracing Whitman's beginnings on Long Island, New York, through to his death not far away in New Jersey more than 70 years later. In between, he tended to and wrote about wounded soldiers of the Civil War, conducted one of the first openly homosexual lives in the U.S., and constantly revised his single book of poems. Ginsberg calls Whitman the first urban poet, but he also wrote plenty of odes to nature, illustrated here by sunsets, running water, and fields as his words are read and sometimes displayed on screen. --Kimberly Heinrichs

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best video on Whitman, January 4, 2008

By 

P. Culliton (Temple, NH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Voices & Visions: Walt Whitman [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I find this video on Whitman one is THE best video out there for teaching purposes. The readings by Galway Kinnell are excellent, as are the biographical analysis by Justin Kaplan (who wrote my favorite biography of Whitman) and the personal interpretations by Allen Ginsberg. Harold Bloom does seem to confuse "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" with "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking" as well as put forth some rather silly theories concerning the poet's relationships with other people; and Donald Hall does make a tiny biographical error; but all-in-all, the film is excellent. The small errors or doubtful interpretations also make great jumping-off points for class discussions.

The film explores variouses influences on the poet, from the King James Bible to to journalism to opera. It also contains some of the earliest images ever made in "moving pictures" to help illustrate the parallel between the visual artist Eakins and the poet Whitman.

I do hope this is reproduced on DVD some time. The VHS tape I bought several years ago plays only on certain VHS players and not on others (sound is distorted, tracking all off). Fortunately, the original is not copy-protected, so I was able to make a copy that does seem okay on other players. Closed-captioning would also be a bonus.