Writers have been grumbling lately that the steady growth of creative writing programs threatens to reduce American fiction and poetry to predictable sameness.

While it's true that a kind of bland uniformity has taken over the short-story trade, poetry is too rebellious for conformity.

There's something about a poem that speaks to the unique nature in all of us, and one American poet -- Walt Whitman -- stands alone in establishing that power.

The voice America heard singing in 1855 was so distinct and new that it eventually turned the country, and its comfort with the genteel poems of the day, on its ear. A citizenry expecting poetry to celebrate a national hero or patriotic event instead heard, "I celebrate myself."

"American Experience" has taken the moment of National Poetry Month to present a compassionate and handsome profile of the poet whose life spanned much of the 19th century. WQED-TV airs the program tomorrow night at 9.

Journeyman reporter, printer, editor, loafer, novelist, diarist, homosexual dandy but, above all, a common man, Whitman in 1855 published 12 poems in a book he set the type for himself, "Leaves of Grass."

It carried no byline -- the poet's name appeared on Page 22 -- and was illustrated by an engraving of a swaggering bearded fellow in the open-collared shirt of a worker.

In this still-new democracy, the United States finally had its first national poet (although it didn't recognize it at the time), a poet from the people who gloried in the sweat and grime of hard work, the colorful and profane language of the wagon driver, the ceaseless labor of the wife and mother, and, yes, the happiness -- and divinity -- of sex.

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I
translate into a new tongue

Bold, confident and a bit of an exhibitionist, Whitman wrote as an innocent discovering the world for the first time. He had no model, only the wishes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had written in an 1843 essay titled "The Poet":

"We have yet no genius in America ... which knew the value of our incomparable materials. ... Yet America is a poem in our eyes, its ample geography dazzles the imagination and it will not wait long for metres."

Emerson would no longer "look in vain for that sort of poet" once Whitman emerged.

Mark Zwonitzer took on the challenge of reducing this colossus of American letters into a 90-minute TV production. His previous work for PBS was "Jesse James" and "The Massie Affair," about a notorious murder trial in Hawaii.

He surrounded Whitman's life with talented interpreters -- actor Chris Cooper as the voice of the poet, readers Martin Espada, Yusef Komunyakaa and Billy Collins, polished poets themselves, and novelist Allan Gurganus to discuss the poet's sexuality.

He accompanies these voices with elaborate, often powerful dramatic scenes reproducing the noisy, crowded streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn of the 1850s and today with clumsily staged gropings in the grass to illustrate Whitman's open sensuality.

Cooper reads the poems themselves movingly with a welter of images changing like fast-action photography of plants growing.

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" captures Whitman's all-encompassing hug of the world and its peoples now and to come. The 1856 poem is one of his best, and its presentation here is moving and insightful, a rare moment in television.

The Civil War changed the nation and Whitman permanently. Well into his 40s when he ventured from Brooklyn to Washington, D.C., where he volunteered in the hospitals, his humanity and hopeful nature suffered along with the dying soldiers.

His poetry in "Drum Taps" and narrative in "Specimen Days" was journalism on a personal level. Rolling forth from Whitman, with his empathy for the young working-class troops and his love of country, the writing is both singular and deeply felt, a rare account of wartime when glory and patriotism were the themes of the time.

The program devotes more than enough coverage to the war years in true Ken Burns old-photo style. Whitman grew to revere Abraham Lincoln as the great unifier. The president's death was another staggering blow to the poet, already in ill health from his exertions on the wards.

Whitman's work can be examined and discussed at great length. Zwonitzer's choices are necessarily limited but largely satisfying. He gives no notice of the poet's best-known works but focuses on "Leaves of Grass," Whitman's essential writing, which he expanded several times over the years.

The selection of voices is well-considered. Cooper is a wonderful reader of Whitman, as are Espada and Komunyakaa. Gurganus, however, smug and salacious, is better taken in smaller doses.

A key contribution comes from Ed Folsom, English professor at the University of Iowa, who clearly explains Whitman's themes. Others -- including the strange-looking Karen Karbiener, who insists oddly that "Whitman wore women's pants," as if it mattered -- seem superfluous.

Finally, regardless of Zwonitzer's care and respect for Whitman, he trusts the power of images and cliched music more than the power of the poems to honor this American giant. As the poet told us:

What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you?
All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own

Else it were time lost listening to me