In Whitman's Pocket, an Imagined Lincoln

The New York Times has an interesting piece about poet Walt Whitman's notebook.

From the article...

Still, as I sit in the manuscript room at the Library of Congress, turning those pages, it soon becomes easy to imagine them traveling inside Walt Whitman’s coat pocket on the Broadway omnibuses, in Pfaff’s beer cellar or crossing the ferry to Brooklyn. The entries, scribbled hastily in pencil, are a jumble of the immortal and the ephemeral: snatches of verse and strange political visions alongside the name of a patent-medicine brand and the addresses of men and women whom the poet met on his rambles around the city. Here and there are traces of these other hands. One page is filled up with the name “Arthur Henry,” crudely repeated; it is believed that Whitman was teaching a workingman or street tough to write his name. Others contain mysterious sketches by an unidentified artist.

And in this little book, sometime during the late fall or winter of 1860-61, the writer began an imaginary conversation that would continue for decades to come, inspiring several of the most famous poems in American literature. There has never been another relationship quite like the one Walt Whitman had with Abraham Lincoln. A poet’s job is to speak the truth; a politician’s is … well, not to. Yet almost from the moment Lincoln appeared on the national political stage, something in Whitman responded. Abe Lincoln, Walt Whitman: the metrical rhyme hinted at grander consonances.