The poet’s muse

“…Whitman placed Fanny Wright alongside Thomas Paine as the two most unjustly vilified figures in the convention-bound collective memory we call history. Freedom of thought was what Walt Whitman wanted, and Fanny Wright armed him with the arsenal of self-permission to pursue it, to go where she herself had gone while still in adolescence. On the pages of her precocious book that so impressed itself upon Whitman’s imagination, Fanny Wright had stepped into and beyond deism to argue—to demonstrate with reason—that the religious notion of an afterlife is a romance of mythology for which there is no physical evidence; that it is therefore far less compelling and interesting than the romance of reality, in which matter itself is in a sense immortal, since atoms undergo a continual reconfiguration from one thing to another. Without her early and lasting imprint on his cosmogony, Whitman might never have written that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”” — Traversal by Maria Popova https://a.co/0bUKGTBg