A few days ago, I was enjoying a dip into the occasionally enjoyable pool of modern televised programming, when I saw an ad, filmed mostly in black and white, for Levi’s jeans. A worn recording is played in the back, with the words being spoken scribbled in white on the bottom-center of the screen. The text sounded so familiar, as did the voice. It was when I was going through the books in my room a few days later (cleaning out) that I stumbled across my copy of Poems by Walt Whitman, published in the 1920’s by the Modern Library. Flipping through the book, I discovered, first with a slight raising of one eyebrow and a smile, and then with chagrin, that the text in the Levi’s ad was the first four lines of the poem, “America”:

“Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,

All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love…”

My first reaction was one of amazement. The idea of using poetry, such beautiful words, in an advertisement, was something I’d never thought about. I had, of course, seen commercials that were parodies of books, historical incidences, films and so on, but I’d never thought of a literary text being used in a commercial. Yet this wasn’t the first time I’d seen it done. Last year, there was an ad for a digital video camera which contained a paragraph-length description of the sea taken from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (I saw this ad, of course, when I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on a Fitzgerald story.) My initial thought was, “How novel!” Yet poets and the advertising field have never really gotten along—case in point: Marianne Moore and Ford. In 1955, Moore was asked by the Ford motor company to name a new line of car that was due to go into production soon, tentatively called the “E-car.” Here are some of the names she suggested: “Resilient Bullet”, “Pastelogram” (my personal favorite) and, most famously, “Utopian Turtletop”. Ford decided it would be best to abandon Moore’s suggestions and call their new line the “Edsel”, which I must say I find an even worse (and certainly less creative) name than “Utopian Turtletop”.

I said earlier that poets and advertisers have never really gotten along. I want to widen the scope a little. Writers and advertisers have never gotten along. It is the continual battle of the writer vs. the Mad Men, to borrow the title of the hit program about advertising firms in the 1950’s. Some writers become their own advertising agencies. Think of Norman Mailer. Mailer is the perfect example. His first collection of short fiction was called Advertisements for Myself, after-all. When his third novel, The Deer Park, was published to an all-round disgruntled response from literary critics, Mailer took an undisclosed amount from his bank account and ran an ad in The Village Voice (the entire ad is reprinted in his 2003 non-fiction collection, The Spooky Art), containing snippets from every bad review he thought worth mentioning. Apparently, he thought that any publicity was good publicity when he decided to put the following at the top of his ad:

“The year’s worst snake-pit in fiction.” — Frank O’Neill, Cleveland News.

This is quickly followed by cries of: “Disgusting” by the Houston Post, “Embarrasing” by the Hartford Times and summed up as “A bunch of bums” by Scott O’Dell in the Los Angeles Mirror News. Even in 2003, Mailer was still defending the book; still acting as his own publicity department: “…It would have reached as high as three or two or even to number one if it had come out in June and then been measured against the low sales of summer, for it sold fifty thousand copies after returns, which surprised a good many in publishing…”

As I watched the Whitman advertisements again on my laptop computer—via YouTube—I became aware that it was cheapening to Walt Whitman, who’s “Song of Myself” makes him, in my mind, the ultimate pre-1960’s free-spirited poet, the somewhat grandfatherly precursor to the beat poets, to become a salesman for Levi’s. Whitman’s poems are about the American identity and frankly should not be running through your mind in the fitting room when you turn around and say, “Does this make my butt look fat?”

And yet, the Whitman series of advertisements do stand as works of art. I believe that ads, like music videos, can attain the status of “high culture”. For example: Michel Gondry, the French director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep, created a controversial ad for Levi’s in the 1990’s which revolved around the old joke of a man who buys contraception in anticipation of a hot date, only to find that his date’s father is the town pharmacist. It is brilliantly filmed in black and white and wonderfully paced.

But that commercial was based around an old joke, a joke created by nobody-knows-who. Here, the creator is Walt Whitman, born 1819, died 1892. We know exactly who it is. While I welcome the notion that this might cause some teenager somewhere in the country to pick up a copy of Leaves of Grass while they’re out getting Levi’s, I’m not going to fool myself. Most people who buy on the basis of this ad will buy not because of who is speaking, but because of the “coolness” effect. It is a case now of Walt Whitman vs. the Mad Men.

This is the link to the first Whitman commercial, “America”, predominantly referred to throughout the article: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdW1CjbCNxw

Here is the second, “O Pioneers!” :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG8tqEUTlvs&feature=related

And finally, for those who have not seen it, here is Michel Gondry’s classic commercial:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj6G1C6c0uw&feature=related

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