Walt Whitman Levis Commercial

If you haven't seen it yet, there's a Levi's commercial that uses the Walt Whitman poem "O, Pioneers!" as its soundtrack.

I used it in my classroom to discuss popular culture representations of literature in American media. Today I decided to gather more information about it and quickly found a number of people writing about the commercial online.

People are divided over whether there's some sort of corruption of taste happening with such a use of Uncle Walt. That sort of opinion espouses a "high culture," Arnoldian point of view.

I think Whitman may have liked the idea, self-promoter that he was.