Blue Book

I find it interesting that Walt Whitman, a poet who hardly used rhyme, focussed so very much on the

rhythm of his work. In the Blue Book this can be seen through all of the punctuation changes that Whitman made. In some places these changes seem to hardly make a difference (using a semi-colon instead of a coma). But, to Walt these had to be important since there were so many alterations of this kind. Also, Walt took the letter "e" from lots of words, I'm not sure if this was meant to change the rhythm as well or if it was supposed to be some sort of statement. Also some sentences were deleted and capitalization changed. 

Mainly I found it interesting how much he focused on the area which talked about all of the different types of American people and States. This can be seen in "Walt Whitman" pages 44-46, as well as the poems before it. I think that the notes in the Blue Book show that Whitman's interest in 1960  was centered around the States.