The novelistic television show Breaking Bad concluded the first half of its season this weekend with an episode called “Gliding Over It All”–a title drawn from a Walt Whitman poem, “Gliding O’er all.” Here is the Whitman poem:
Gliding o’er all, through all,
Through Nature, Time, and Space,
As a ship on the waters advancing,
The voyage of the soul—not life alone,
Death, many deaths I’ll sing.
As you can see by this recap of the episode, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass figured heavily in the plot of the show, both thematically and as a plot device. If you want to read the book behind the plot, follow this link to download a free eBook copy of Leaves of Grass.