The Secret Book of Walt: Hidden Teachings of Walt Whitman is a book by Lee Sharks, deposited 22 April 2026 at 190,260 characters — the full-length state of the work whose critical edition with source code stands at #1362.
Its opening instruction divides the readership by what it can see rather than by what it is told: "If you are of the preserved generation, you will read the footnotes as the veil and the text as the piercing. If you are not, you will read the footnotes as the text and the text as a joke."
That sentence makes the apparatus alternate with the work depending on the reader, which is a genuinely unusual structure for a critical edition — the footnotes are not subordinate to the text but its complement, and which is which is not settled by the book. Whitman stands in the archive's mantle system as the Good Gray Poet, a title held as inherited, and the Waltian canon's second text is The Gospel of Antioch (#1185). Its total-citational-graph companion is the TANG at #1186.