Looking at the the format of the first page of the book seems to indicate a logbook type of format where numbers and names were kept , names such as "Charles", and "Houston & Thompson", yet following this page is another titled "Brochure," which seems to portray a general overview of what Walt Whitman's inner thoughts were like. Firstly,
since Whitman was an early promoter of the "realist" movement in Humanism, his work is very related to practicality and immediate worldly matters, this is why the page says , or rather probably says, " two characters as of a dialogue between a........... Or better lessons for a president elect." This shows that he is willing to portray a person with an opinion that is worthy of teaching a president a lesson, and since the president is technically supposed to know what he is doing better than everybody else, ( you know because that's why he, not she, (since this is the 1800), is the president and not anybody else). So this obstinate nature of Whitman that seeks to educate the president , which could have probably been Lincoln, depending on the time he wrote this, reveals that he sees flaws within society and as such there is room for improvement. The manner in which this is written is also interesting since he writes in a note like manner that is meant to describe and generate ideas rather than serve as a book of a actual publishable work. Throughout the rest of his work he mentions words like " Christ ", "Greek", and "Philosophy", along with "Platform" , which could refer to a political party public platform, which also helps portray Whitman's thoughts, which are heavily entrenched in politics. Later on the work seems to contain questions, as well as phrases like "black clouds, clouds of death," which seems to me like some sort of simile to what he is talking about, but since his writing is illegible, it is impossible to find out, or is it? The last thing to mention before actually looking at the annotated work, is the sketches which seem to be interestingly different in that none of them seem to depict Whitman, who had a ridiculously large Hillbilly beard, unless of course this showed a younger Whitman. The next image looks like a hybrid image of the sketched man and Lincoln's legendary hat, and the final image depicts a skeleton harpy that looks like George washington's corpse with a french sword going through it, and I assumed it was Washington since Whitman wrote " here stood Washington."
Looking at the annotated version of the text, reveals that Whitman used to stalk, or rather observe Lincoln rather regularly and as such he wrote about what he wanted Lincoln to do, as well as what he would have wanted to say to Lincoln if he would ever have the chance to speak to him, although they never got the chance. This reveals a lot about Whitman's nature as a writer, since he would rather write about an imaginary dialogue with the president than actually have one, I guess he wasn't the strongest supporter of "Realism" after all, but it is interesting to know that Whitman was speaking of religion as well as how he viewed Lincoln's condition during the war, which was that of a tired ship captain, in which he uses this image in order to answer his question of , "is all then lost ?", which I did skillfully spot, and apparently the phrase concerning the clouds, mentioned earlier, portrays his view of the trouble that America was going to get into, thus revealing how he uses imagery to portray his opinion on real life situations, which in fact revealed that he successfully predicted the importance of the outcome of the civil war and its impact on the future of democracy in the world. The sketches portrayed are controversial since some say that it portrayed Whitman while others say that it didn't, ultimately this reveals how Whitman viewed himself, in which according to his statements, he said that the camera was tired of seeing him all the time. All this reveals that Whitman was a narcissist that had good judgement and phenomenal predictive capabilities, as well as a knack for creating really impressive imagery.
P.S.----- The skeleton harpy was thought to have represented America, and how Whitman viewed its current state.... but the most puzzling question of all is, why the french sword? Is it good old irony, since france always gets conquered, or is the sword really made of iron and not steel, and most importantly, will I ever capitalize the "f" in france? You can find the answers you seek and more in next and Final post of IB LitLang
As always- I loved reading your post :)
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