Is your analysis of Whitman as a commercial agent changed by the fact that this is a luxury vehicle rather than jeans? As in my prior post (people, seriously, this is turning into Blog of Myself, you have to get on it), what does this commercial say about America? About masculinity? About freedom? Feel free to analyze any specific moments also.
Both Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson believed in the written word not just as an articulation of one’s inner thoughts but, fundamentally, as a way to reach and even touch other people. They lived in an era that saw the nation fracture and turn on itself, massacring its own sons; that adhered to strict classes and saw both the bitter defense of, and legal end to, the abhorrent practice of slavery but not racial oppression; that saw massive national movements of Christian revival when they themselves often met the divine in other ways; that saw Oscar Wilde in England jailed and destroyed by a sexuality the world knew how to punish but not name; that felt the national growing pains of hundreds of thousands of (mostly European) immigrants and a colonization and settlement of western territories; that did not yet offer universal public education to its children. The word–a touch–was a form of connection in a rapidly changing world. And so it shall be for us. Get at it.