Deciphering Walt Whitman's Notebooks

I have recently decided to focus my thesis on  “creation myth” as it evolves in the 20th century in American Modernist Literature. Walt Whitman is considered a protomodernist, and I think he was one of the first to establish the creation myth in America, or the idea that people are inextricably linked to nature in a divine, intimate, and infinite way.

While I am still refining my research question, I was happy to find some of Whitman’s notebooks in the Library of Congress American Memory website.  In the literature section, there was a collection of his notebooks, the earliest of which contains some elements that would later appear in his infamous “Leaves of Grass” poem.

I was first caught up in deciphering the notebook as “material”.  Steven Stowe discusses how important it is to remember the materiality of personal texts and to ask “who, including the author, has been involved in creating this text now in front of us. What can we know of their motives and intentions?”  I noticed that in flipping through some of the pages, they were black, which the Library of Congress explained as being because Walt Whitman often tore out pages of his notebook, and in presenting the digital copy they decided to present the remaining edge as one page, even though most of the digital page is blacked out.  Example:

I also wondered why the cover said in what looked to be Whitman’s handwriting, “Earliest and Most Im-portant Note Book of Walt Whitman”.  Why would he want to present his first journal as such?  Referring to himself in third-person, and classifying it as the most important seems to suggest that he thought people would read his notebook after his death, and he wanted future readers to know that this was what he considered his most important diary. I wonder if this is a fair inference to make, and if not, how I could learn more about how his notebooks were created?

Pages 17-24 I found to be particularly interesting as, Whitman explores “American character”, but found his handwriting hard to interpret. Pg, 24 in particular I was the most interested in, but had the hardest time interpreting.  He mentions “spears of grass”, foreshadowing his poem to come, and something about “America [something?] the spirit of the past”.

So, I was left with some questions as I sought to interpret Walt Whitman's notebook. How can I decipher messy handwriting? Is there a typed interpretation that I can get ahold of somewhere? How can I better make inferences about the author’s motives for putting together his notebook in this particular way?