George Fetherling's Walt Whitman's Secret

A book trailer for Walt Whitman's Secret. In this wonderfully imagined novel, Walt Whitman's secret isn't his homosexuality but another one entirely. It's a political secret, one that the greatest American poet of the nineteenth century has pledged himself to keep until he is on his deathbed.

http://www.booklounge.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679312239&ref=vid...

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Walt Whitman
• random house canada
• american poet
• canadian authors

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It was Whitman's `disciple' Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke that coined the term "Cosmic Consciousness" and wrote a book of that title. It was the first attempt by a Western scientist to explain the evolution of consciousness from simple, through self, to cosmic, consciousness. It was based on his own experience of `cosmic consciousness' that he realized through his own passionate seeking and through his association with Walt Whitman. Several others around Whitman had some degree of this experience.

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Malcolm Cowley grasped that "`Song of Myself' is hardly at all concerned with American nationalism, political democracy, contemporary progress, or other social themes that are commonly associated with Whitman's work. Its subject is a state of illumination induced by two (or three) separate moments of ecstasy." Cowley recognized that Whitman experienced "Samadhi." Indeed Thoreau remarked to Whitman that he seemed awfully like the Indians.

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Whitman wrote: "Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more, For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at." Fetherling has indeed missed Whitman entirely.

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Ben Aronin's novel was also a biographical fiction but one that does not perpetuate, as Fetherling's does, many old tired claims and academic myths that Whitman was gay (he embraced, rather than bashed, everyone), was contributing to the idea of American exceptionalism (the Puritans were responsible for that), etc. Aronin's book is written around love and breaking barriers (Whitman falls in love with a black woman) and Fetherling's around a dislike based on his own profound misunderstanding.

[thallassocracy]

If someone can make Walt Whitman this tedious in a two minute video - I dread to think what he could carry off in a full length book.

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Regarding George Fetherling's book "Walt Whitman's Secret" I must say that he is a very poor spokesperson for Whitman (even if it is a novel). Added to this even his title has been appropriated from another author, Ben Aronin, who wrote "Walt Whitman's Secret", Chicago: Argus Books, 1955. Malcolm Cowley was the first modern literary critic to grasp what Whitman was about and in that vein Indian sages and scholars have referred to him as an American "Rishi."