Walt Whitman rises from a hardscrabble boyhood in New York to write Leaves of Grass in 1855; a work that revolutionizes poetry.This episode explores the mystery of how a seemingly ordinary writer, with little education or training, could have created such a literature-altering masterpiece. Many of Whitman most famous poems are profiled, including There Was a Child Went Forth, I Hear America Singing, Song of the Open Road, I Sing the Body Electric, and Song of Myself.