Life in the United States today is shot through with uncertainty:
about our jobs, our mortgaged houses, our retirement accounts, our
health, our marriages, and the future that awaits our children. For
many, our lives, public and private, have come to feel like the
discomfort and unease you experience the day or two before you get
really sick. Our life is a scratchy throat. John Marsh offers an
unlikely remedy for this widespread malaise: the poetry of Walt
Whitman. Mired in personal and political depression, Marsh turned
to Whitman--and it saved his life. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer
Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself is a book about how
Walt Whitman can save America's life, too. Marsh identifies four
sources for our contemporary malaise (death, money, sex, democracy)
and then looks to a particular Whitman poem for relief from it. He
makes plain what, exactly, Whitman wrote and what he believed by
showing how they emerged from Whitman's life and times, and by
recreating the places and incidents (crossing Brooklyn ferry,
visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals) that inspired Whitman to
write the poems. Whitman, Marsh argues, can show us how to die, how
to accept and even celebrate our (relatively speaking) imminent
death. Just as important, though, he can show us how to live: how
to have better sex, what to do about money, and, best of all, how
to survive our fetid democracy without coming away stinking
ourselves. The result is a mix of biography, literary criticism,
manifesto, and a kind of self-help you're unlikely to encounter
anywhere else.
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