Why did the movie do better in the heartland than expected? My take here. I guess, after a few pedantic emails, I should address my description of Whitman as a man of the heartland. I am well aware that he spent much of his life on Long Island and in Brooklyn. But he also traveled widely, spent time in New Orleans, visited the Civil War battlefields, journeyed through St Louis and Chicago. His poetry is redolent with the wildernesses of the American frontier; and Long Island in the mid nineteenth century was not exactly what we would now think of as "blue state." That's my point.