Blog Post #14

Step 1)

The journal itself is extremely worn, but this could just be a product of the fact that it is more than a hundred years old instead of Whitman’s usage. The writing style of Whitman often seems to be scribbled and randomly strewn across the page in a hurried manner. On a page titled “Brochure” there are the initials A. L.—this could be a reference to Abraham Lincoln. On a page containing a poem that starts off with “Welcome the storm” I can see that Whitman has crossed out several words and replaced them with different ones. I find this interesting because it shows that Whitman was human and made mistakes that he found necessary to correct. There are several doodles of who appears to be Whitman. Some of the seem to almost be distorted due to their incorrect bodily proportions, which could mean that Whitman has a sense of humor. The picture of the skeleton on the final page is eerie and out of place. It has a morbid theme to it, and could mean that Whitman was contemplating the idea of death. Over the course of the poems I often had a hard time reading Whitman’s handwriting.

Step 2)

If find it interesting that Whitman put names and addresses on the inside cover—it shows that he thought of it as something more personal to him than simply a place to store his thoughts. I am intrigued that he chose to comment on his beliefs on religion, contemplating the ideas of the Greek sage and Judaism and Christianity. I think the theory of using “Liberdad” instead of “Liberty” is interesting because it shows that Whitman may have believed that the concept of freedom wasn’t limited to America alone. I also find it interesting that Whitman reached the conclusion that the history of the world depended on the success or failure of America’s democratic experiment before the President did. The fact that Whitman often passed his notebook around, as evident by the doodles of him that he likely did not draw, raises questions on whether or not we can be confident that everything found in them is his own work. I enjoyed the picture of the skeleton with the sword through his heart; I think that much of the notebook shows Whitman’s self-reflection on the circumstances that America was in and how he found them dire.