Witty Whitman's Wonderful Writings

People always say that people with the sloppiest handwriting are often the people that have great intelligence.  Looking at Whitman's notebook visually displays this great phenomenon.  It is extremely difficult to read, or even make out some words in Whitman;s notebook because his slanted cursive handwriting is all over the notebook, with no clear organization, and several things are crossed out.  This sloppy mess of a notebook is justified by my theory that Whitman did not care how clearly he was writing, he just wrote down something in this notebook whenever it came to him, before it left his memory.  Also the pencil marks go from light to dark showing that Whitman took and wrote in this notebook whether he had a surface to write on or not.  This also explains the strong connection the elements of nature had to inspire his poems.

Some of the words and short phrases that I could make out where "and you,""clouds of death," and "stuff you are made of."  These few lines stood out to me that most because they we written on their own lines in Whitman's notebook, and they were in larger handwriting than the other lines surrounding them.  Since they are larger, i think that these were the lines that Whitman started or ended some of his poems with, because the lines were at the top or the bottom of the page in his notebook.

Its noted that the images began to fill the pages of the notebook.  What I noticed about the images were that they started to become more abstract and stranger in nature. The explanation that The New York Times give for these illustrations were that Whitman would pass his notebook around, usually in a bar, resulting in strange portraits of Whitman.  The illustration of a figure with a skull and a heart pierced by a rapier is said to be "an allegory of America itself, poised in a strange halfway state, suspended between day and night, life and death."  This allegory makes sense especially because Whitman compares America to a boat in bad weather.  Now the hat that the figure in the illustration looks like Abraham Lincoln's famous top hat, and this could represent the influence that Lincoln had on Whitman and how Whitman may feel like he has to carry on that burden.