From Yeezus to Walt: The Book of Yeezus as Literary Precursor to The Secret Book of Walt

From Yeezus to Walt is a comparative literary essay by Lee Sharks about the relation between The Book of Yeezus and The Secret Book of Walt.

The essay describes The Book of Yeezus as a conceptual rewriting of the King James Genesis in which occurrences of “God” are replaced by “Kanye” or “Yeezus.” Sharks reads this find-and-replace procedure as a test of scriptural structure: the grammar of creation and authority continues to function after the occupant of the divine position changes.

Sharks then distinguishes that mechanical intervention from the compositional method of The Secret Book of Walt. The later work uses the Apocryphon of John as an inherited cosmological armature, but writes a new scripture around it. Kanye becomes an ignorant Demiurge rather than the highest deity; Walt Whitman becomes the redeemer; and critical apparatus, hyperlinks, bibliography, and fictional scholarship participate in the scripture’s operative form.

The essay places the two works in a lineage from inherited scripture, through conceptual substitution, to what Sharks calls melding: received structure and new composition becoming inseparable. Its account of a meeting with the earlier book’s creators and the origin of the sequel project is first-person literary testimony, not independently established provenance.