Step 1:

When I first saw the prompt I thought that the journal would be more like drafts of poetry and more focused on creating poetry and it is but not in the way I thought it would be. His poems don't seem to come out of "Work Time". They seem to just be a list of everything that he thought about throughout his life and this is reflected in the journal. He doesn't have drafts of poems he just has observations about the world that he puts together. He has lists of things, I don't know what because I cant read it, that are put on the side of a page. This makes me think that he comes up with an idea and then comes back to it throughout the rest of his life to add to the list when he sees new things. Another thing i noticed is the "?". A lot of things have question marks next to them like he is asking the Cosmos what it thinks. This shows how his poems are created and how they are really just a stream of thought.

Step 2:

A lot of what i said is confirmed by the notes. Where he says "I shall see the crash" and later adds perhaps shows how he is just writing his thoughts down. To me, Walt Whitman is really more of a philosopher than he is a poet. He is just writing down his thoughts about the things he sees in free verse. If his free verse had a little less flourish it would just be philosophic writing. Then again a lot of poetry about thoughts and people is just philosophy with some flare.