Whitman's Diary

Wow. Sometimes I'm glad cursive is a dying practice because boy is it not fun to decipher, especially in this case!

My general first impressions are that the journal is disorganized and sloppy. Several things are crossed out or written in. It definitely looks like he was drafting something or trying to record ideas. Also there's a seal that keeps appearing on the pages. Not sure if Whitman added that or if that was added later from a library perhaps. I really liked looking at the sketches. For some reason, I find those more intimate than the words he wrote down. It seems like he was drawing portraits of himself. He seems to like talking about himself in his poems, why not draw himself? They got silly as I went through. There was also a picture of a harp, and a picture of a a skull-thing. The skull-thing seemed like it related to the civil war. It was impaled with a sword and it wore a colonial hat.

I could make out most of the words, so no particular words stood out. It seemed like a lot of the notes he wrote related to the time period. Like Lincoln and the Civil War. I'm sure they must be big influences on his poetry.

After reading the notes to the document, there is a lot more clarity. So the stamp is from the Library of Congress. Wow! What a disappointment! He didn't even sketch the doodles. He did like having portraits done of himself, and I think that reveals something about him. He's reflective and borderline narcissistic.

The journal reveals a lot about the influence of the time on Whitman. He was a fan boy of Lincoln, and he thought and wrote about the civil war often. This just goes to show that art mimics reality. Whitman's poems described his experiences with the civil war and with Lincoln (or imagined experiences).