Here’s an amazing TV commercial for Levi’s Jeans starring…. Walt Whitman! Click on image for larger view.

Yes, that’s his actual voice reading the 1888 poem America in this video poem/commercial.  Here’s another video poem for Whitman’s Pioneers from Leaves of Grass..this time read by actor Will Greer. (These pieces are directed by M. Blash of the ad agency Wieden & Kennedy).

Aja Gabel comments:

When I watch the commercials, I am convinced that I am the mistress of my own fate. I’m just not sure if I’m okay with that fate being sold to me for $40 a pair by a man who worked nearly his entire life to eschew the mainstream. If Whitman wore jeans, he wore them because they were the clothes of the rebellious, not because they were the affordable uniform of the pretty.

I’m actually all for corporations co-opting public domain images and sounds and stories. It’s good to have a lifeline to previous eras, good to see a contemporary rendering of an early poem. Perhaps it would be better if videographers did these kinds of reworking outside of ads  (so we don’t have to spend so much time guessing at the video’s hidden agenda).  What next – Emily Dickinson being used to sell deodorant?

1 COMMENT

  1. Discovery of this recording sparked a great debate; scholars still do not know if this recording is the real voice of Walt Whitman.

    A NY Times article:
    http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/16/books/poem-is-whitman-s-is-the-voice.html

    A downloadable MP3:
    http://www.whitmanarchive.org/multimedia/index.html

    There is no mention by Whitman himself, or by any of his friends or contemporary biographers including Horace Traubel and Bliss Perry, that such a recording was ever made. Only Thomas Edison, the inventor of this high-quality recording process, wrote that he would like to record Whitman’s voice.

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