Whitman's Notes

1. First couple of pages appear to be dates and times of meetings with different people. Page 3 talks about a brochure with two character. One appears to be Abraham Lincoln and he describes it using the words "lessons for a president elect." These ideas were never published, even in verse form Wrote notes about Greek culture and philosophy. Notes on religion, specifically Christianity and Christ, were Whitman's attempts to reconcile two different religious platforms Rough drafts of poems such as the one about the ship and how everybody can sail. Next page has a rough draft of a poem about the mad, raging wind. Switch in tones from page to page. Pages 11-12 have freehand drawings of a man, one is just of the man's head and the other has the same head on a disproportionate body, which appears to be in an awkward gesture. Sketches continus to pages 13-14, but the man slowly starts to resemble Abraham Lincoln, especially on page 14 where he drew said man with a tall black hat on. He has a sketch of a title called "The Bohemian." (apparently he appropriated the term He has ideas for different poems, such as The Hall of Brooklyn, and it looks as if he started writing for that poem but didn't finish. The sketch on the last page is quite interesting. It has a skeleton with a heart body who has a sword piercing his body. The background looks as if it could represent the beach and the overall picture could be depicting a war. This picture is said to represent America in  Some of the names included were people who fought during the Civil war, which could mean that Whitman had intentions of interviewing them for their personal accounts of the war. Ideas often start out as dark and pessimistic, but later change into ideas of hope, particularly for the Union.

Throughout Whitman's journal I noticed  a lot of things that had been crossed out and a lot of incomplete thoughts. I think that this is significant because it gives us insight to his creative process. Whitman suffered from manic depression (bipolar disorder) and there have been several creative geniuses who have also suffered from manic depression, and it has shown itself in their creative processes and in some of their work. While majority of the words I could not make out, the ones that I understood enough to piece together some of the ideas in his journal like the ideas about the lessons for the president elect, or the poem idea about the wind hand how his tone shifts from one page to the other when writing about the wind and sailing. In my opinion the sketches in his journal reflect himself at first and later develop into the character he is trying to develop, in this case, Abraham Lincoln. I think this journal reveals that Whitman liked to challenge the ideas of his time and used poetry to express his opinions, which would explain why his poetry was not popular when he first wrote it.
2. After looking at the  notes on Whitman's journal, I understood a lot more of what he was writing about. He had strong beliefs about what was right and wrong according to topics like slavery and immigration, and shared the same position as Abraham Lincoln, who inspired many of the entries in Whitman's journal, like the brochure for the lessons for an elect president, and the verse entry that was about the ship, where he compared Lincoln's presidency to a sailing ship experiencing raging winds. The notes also revealed that Whitman frequently had incomplete thoughts, which I consider a normal aspect of a journal, especially for someone who had so many creative thoughts that may have rapidly occurred, or one thought may have lead into another totally unrelated idea.