The Whitman Diaries

Observation #1: Mr. Whitman did not have OCD.

Amidst the scratches and the stamps, Walt Whitman reveals his train of thought and his beliefs.  I first just scanned all of the pages to get an idea of what his notebook entailed.  Nothing really stood out to me until I got to the drawings.  On the last page, there is an illustration of a skeleton with a sword going through its heart shaped body.  It is a stark contrast to his other drawings of the profiles of a man with a beard.  All of the drawings show the left side of the man's face.  I find this fascinating- maybe Whitman was just trying to fine-tune an image in his head on paper, maybe he thinks that the right side of the face is the most telling, or maybe because he was before his time and knew that the left side of the face is more prone to skin cancer.  In all of the drawings of this man, the eyes are looking down as if ashamed or contemplating.

I then examined his writings further.  I discovered that Whitman contemplated big ideas and principles.  I saw the repetition of the word "liberty", which I think is reflective of the time during which Whitman wrote, the Civil War.  One line reads: "Ship of Liberty, blow mad winds!"  and another references lessons for a president elect.  He also repeats ideas surrounding religion, love, ocean, and crashes.  I think that this shows that Whitman explored religion and religious motives. Whitman's pairing of ocean imagery with religion shows that he welcomes the ebbs and flows of life and values his spirituality.

The president elect in Whitman's dialogue is Lincoln.  The thing I found the most fascinating was that his references to religion in his notes may have served as an allegory of the Civil War.  He wrote about a Civil War deity because rebellion and resistance are built into his idea of the godhead.  I noticed that his spelling of "liberty" looked a bit off, but I couldn't think of what else he would be writing.  After reading the notes, I realized that he was not writing "liberty" but the Spanish spelling of "libertad".  It's so fascinating to me that using the spelling of another language can have such a deeper and more expansive meaning.  He wanted to suggest that liberty extends beyond the borders of our nation and that he connected the Union with democratic and nationalist movements throughout the world.  The ship and ocean references reflect both a national, the future of liberty, and a personal, the diminishing value of authors, struggle.  The obscure drawing on the last page is yet another reference to American during the Civil War, poised between day and night, life and death.  These notes reveal that Whitman was a politically-aware man who believed that the success of liberty in the United States would affect the success of liberty globally.  His writings reflected the time in which he lived and wrote and foreshadowed what was to come for the country.