Andrew Deitrick: Walt Whitman

This class has opened me up to interpreting a variety of materials through different religious and philosophical trains of thought. For my American Literature class, I found myself doing the same thing. I chose to look at the poetry of Walt Whitman through the eye of Vedantic mysticism. While I'm not the first and only to see the patterns of India throughout Whitman's work, but I felt as if I was the only one in my class who really appreciated the hidden nuances of meaning that are present. A little discouraged, I hit the internet with a search on the subject and found a book by VK Chari about Whitman's mysticism. One of the opening lines went something along the lines of, many readers with a background in Indian Philosophy will find themselves engulfed in smile after reading a majority of Whitman's poetry, especially those concerning death and rebirth. Anyone interested in this should look at A Song of Joys or A Song of Myself for a place to start.