Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps

it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream

van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds. Thanks for downloading

this program from the free thinking team at the BBC. I sing the body electric. I am large. I contain multitudes. I am the man. It's all me, me,

me with Walt Whitman, the 19th century American poet who aligned his country with his body

and put his body at the heart of his work. No other poet, not Longfellow, not Dickinson,

not the guy who first put the contorted sentence,

O's say, can you see by the dawn's early light down on paper,

achieved such a profound elision between his art

and the nation in which it was produced.

You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman,

without leaves of grass, said his friend

Mary Smith Costello, elevating the collection on which he toiled on and off for the whole

of his poetic life, and which is the subject of this programme. If you don't know Whitman, you don't

know America. Could this have been true then? And might it be true today, given that one of the most emphatic qualities of Whitman's work

is his expression of what we might now read

as its passionately bisexual vision?

What does modern America think of the big hairy manhug

first offered by the speaker of leaves of grass in 1855?

On this edition of Freethinking,

we've gathered a caucus of experts to see if they want to reciprocate.

The poet and memoirist Mark Doty joins us on a line from New York,

...