Walt Whitman the Always lit Man

This blog on America's 'Good Grey Poet' begins with my examinations of Walt's personal notebook and my response, and is followed by my response to.

Walt's Notebook:

My initial reaction to seeing the contents of Whitman's notebook was holy crap. This is because one of the most cohesive and legible transcendentalist authors has such a disorganized and jumbled notebook. After my initial reaction faded, I realized it was not altogether atypical of an artist or writer to have jumbled personal thoughts that seem to make little sense to a reader. Part of having a personal notebook is that it is just that, personal, and Whitman's scribbled notes made sense to him. My next thought was to look past the formatting difficulties and try to find content that was more revealing about Walt himself. Many of the lines of prose are appear to be thought of on the go, and Walt has written them down in apparent way to remember them for later works. One line stood out to me because it seems to stray from the pattern of lines written for poems, Walt wrote "I want to see what ? before I die" on one of the later journal pages. This line stands out to me because it brings home the point that Walt was approaching the end of his life while compiling the Leaves of Grass. The drawings also interested me because of their apt portraiture. Walt including drawings in his notebook characterizes him as artistic but also interested in the human form. All drawings but one are of a male face, and the drawing that is an exception to this rule strays far from the others. On the last page of a notebook there is a depiction of a skeleton with curly hair, a three point hat, and a large sword through its heart standing on a beach with its arms in a shrugging position. This sketch could symbolize death or the loss of love, but it is not exactly clear to me why Walt would include this drawing in his personal notebook. Walt Whitman's inner thoughts appear to characterize him as a dedicated poet and an all around artist who concerned himself with the issue of his own mortality and of humanity.

New York Times analysis of Walt's Notebook:

The New York Times sought out to provide an insightful commentary on the inner thoughts of Walt Whitman, of which they did incredibly well. The first yellow note describes the names and addresses of the people Walt Whitman wrote down to remember, a fact that seems altogether less significant. The New York Times then dropped a bombshell about something I failed to notice, that Walt Whitman's notebook began an imaginary dialogue between himself and Abraham Lincoln. Whitman then goes on to discuss religion, liberty, and the dissolving of the Union during the Civil War. Whitman's writings on these topics, snippets of a conversation he never had, are of profound significance as far as context for his later work such as Drum Taps. After the conclusion of his passage Libertad, Whitman begins Ship of State a direct assessment of 'President-elect' Abraham Lincoln's capabilities. Whitman states that "any body can sail with a fair wind, or a smooth sea" implicitly referring to Lincoln's difficult position as captain of the ship in metaphorical rough seas. Whitman then calls out "Blow mad winds!" as a way of saying that circumstance could test Lincoln and liberty itself, but he believed that Abraham Lincoln and the United States could weather the challenges. The New York Times also informed me that the sketches are likely portraits of Whitman drawn by someone else and not original works of his.

Conclusion:

Overall, the in-depth New York Times analysis provided me with a much deeper understanding of Whitman's notebook than my surface level observation of its pages. It is clear through my own assessment and that of the New York Times that Walt Whitman was in fact large and contained multitudes. On one hand, his personal life was going through a midlife crisis, but on the other hand Whitman was a joyful man who viewed America's future with optimism. Even though Whitman assessed the waters Lincoln would navigate to be rough, he had faith in Lincoln's ability to preserve liberty in the United States. Whitman proved himself to be a complicated, but still immensely likable author with the personal thoughts in his journal.