I recently came across notes I’d taken while working on The Writer’s Journal: 40 Writers and Their Journals. I’d long relished the journals of Emerson and Thoreau and liked reading about how the transcendentalists, including Louisa May Alcott, shared their journals with one another. But when I solicited the poet Henri Cole as a contributor to my 1997 book, I was abashed at not knowing what he meant when he called his journal a commonplace book. He told me the term came to him from the title of a book by the poet Auden.
 But where did Auden get the term? I delved into books about journals and diaries to find out more. Although I didn’t find out who invented the term, I found out a lot about commonplace books and also about writers who adored published and unpublished journals of historical figures and the angles from which journals record human existence.

This week, I share a recap of the notes I took as well as an idea based on the information I found for helping you revitalize your journal keeping.

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Author Thomas Mallon explores historic journals in A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries. According to Mallon, a commonplace book was a kind of ledger into which one would record one’s reading, quotes from that reading, and other information that came one’s way. In tidbits about the commonplace book, Mallon cites an 1886 publication by Lucy Toulmin Smith called A Common-place Book of the Fifteenth Century. He notes that in his research he came across the case of commonplace book from a Sussex manor house, started by someone who entered sayings, prayers, bits from the poet Lydgate, puzzles, a saint’s life, a religious play and other pieces of “practical and literary knowledge.” Eventually a family steward found the book with some empty pages and began to use them to keep his accounts. Then someone else found the book and stuck in a prescription of herbs to treat yellow jaundice. This book changed as each new author took it over.

Mallon also describes the commonplace book of John Manningham, who wrote about sermons by the great preachers of London and Cambridge during the last days of Elizabeth I’s reign and about colleagues, one of whom was the young John Donne. Manningham wrote of a play he saw in February 1601, “Twelve night, or what you will…” In his commonplace book, Mallon writes, Manningham exercised his wit and stored ideas and ways of saying things until he could utter them.

Although we do not know, Mallon asserts, whether the great bard Shakespeare kept a diary, we do know he endowed one of his characters with such a book. Hamlet, blocked in his decision about how to conduct himself in regards to avenging his father’s murder, makes note in his “tables” of what he learns from his father’s ghost — “That one may smile and smile, and be a villain.”

In the mid-1600’s, the philosopher John Locke kept a commonplace book. To him the proper commonplace book had an index composed of boxes that the journal keeper would fill in with the subject headings that summarized the categories the entries could be divided into. The entries themselves were to be quotes without added context or notes form the journal keeper’s life. Working in the 1800’s, Emerson broke away from this prescription, adding his own thoughts and observations and keeping them by date. He helped make the journal into “a writer’s workplace” according to author Lawrence Rosenwald in Emerson and the Art of the Diary.

John Milton left behind a commonplace book that holds the philosophy, history, and poetry that he studied before writing Paradise Lost. W. H. Auden entitled the book he published of his most personal prose, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book. Contemporary Poet Henri Cole wrote that he keeps a daily journal when he is traveling, but the rest of the time he keeps a commonplace book into which he records passages from whatever he is currently reading. In his contribution to The Writer’s Journal, 40 Writers and Their Journals, Cole writes that he makes withdrawals from both the “bank accounts” he is keeping.

Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth’s sister, is famous for a diary she kept from 1800 to 1803, called the Grasmere Journal. It is a record of William Wordsworth’s comings and goings and studies and of her own responses to living among the writers William knew. In 1817, Mary Shelley kept a journal of the reading she and her husband Percy did, and she wrote about her drawing and study and assistance to Percey in getting his work copied for publication.

There are hundreds of journals and diaries of historical and literary value to those of us who want to trace other people’s life journeys and times. Among those hundreds whose journals have been published are Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn (author of Sylva, an early book on trees), James Boswell, Benjamin Franklin, Captain Cook, Captain Scott (explorer of Antarctica), Walt Whitman (he kept a Civil War Diary called Specimen Days), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Wolf, Ann Frank, Elizabeth Bishop, E. M. Forster and Allen Ginsberg.

Make a trip to the memoir, autobiography, and literary criticism sections of your local bookstore and you will see scores of published journals in addition to compilations of letters (the journals’ first cousin) by and between historic figures and writers. You’ll find journals of women pioneering westward, teachers, exiles, doctors, musicians, religious thinkers, philosophers and scientists, among others. You’ll learn about articles written in journal form like “Letters from Paris,” which the New Yorker Magazine published religiously for years before World War II.

Today, influenced by the work of psychologists and many in the self-help movement, the journal has become a tool for self-growth as well as for keeping records of a life lived and observed. Any online search will yield titles for journals of young people suffering from the effects of war and crime-ridden neighborhoods, journals of those suffering terminal and mental illness, and journals of those deep into personal endeavors.

Marlene Schiwy, who wrote A Voice of Her Own: Women and the Journal-Writing Journey, maintains that the diary gained a new dignity as a literary genre when Anais Nin published her diaries in volume after volume affirming “the importance of every diarist’s inner psychic journey.” She gave the diary meaning as “a channel for self-understanding and creative expression.” Ira Progoff leveraged this in his teaching and book, At a Journal Workshop.

As women in particular continued to search in the 70’s and 80’s for a voice, Christina Baldwin’s One to One: Self Understanding Through Journal Writing and Tristine Rainer’s The New Diary: How to Use a Journal for Self-Guidance and Expanded Creativity  were publishing successes. As many women hungered to read the published journals of other women, May Sarton’s Journal of Solitude attracted millions who longed for the life she documented. Schiwy describes that as “devoted to poetry and writing, friendship and the natural world.” It wasn’t long before Revelations: Diaries of Women, an anthology of women’s diaries spanning a thousand years from the tenth century book Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon to modern diaries became a classic.

A writer who absorbed the significance of journal keeping in American literature is Alfred Kazin, author of A Walker in the City and other memoirs. The son of Jewish immigrants to the United States, he became enthralled with the journal keepers of earlier literature in America. Quoted in William Zinsser’s Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, Kazin says that the journal he began in his boyhood was “a cherished connection with something fundamental to American literature–the need to be present to God, the Eternal Reader and Judge of the soul’s pilgrimage on earth, the veritable record of one’s inner life.” He called journal keeping “a habit of mind.”

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Thinking of your journal as a place to record your habit of mind seems a wonderful idea for helping see that your explorations in language lead to a way of thinking that replenishes your writing.

Considering what is most attractive to you to record and what is most unattractive to record will lead to new mechanisms for finding deeper meaning from writing.

If you make a commitment to alternating in your journal between recording what is most attractive to you and recording what is least attractive to you, after a month or so, you will see that you have begun a whole new way of looking at the world through juxtapositions

For instance, recording observations of people alternated with shopping lists of your own could lead to a personal essay that starts with the difference between what you buy now and what you used to buy. It could lead to noticing repetitions in what you buy and repetitions in what you think and write about. “Repetitions” could become the title for a piece of writing about the meanings of patterns in your life or about a loved one for whom you are buying much of what is on your lists. There are endless ways in which you can sculpt writing ideas from the patterns you’ll find when you start alternating ways of keeping a journal.

The poet Wallace Stevens is quoted as saying:

… a poem and the reader engage in a sort of muscular struggle with each other–that struggle is how they become intimate, how they really “know” each other.

Taking on a mixture of kinds of recordings in your journal will help you develop the intimacy writing demands — the surprises, the insight, the honesty, the going forward with the you-don’t-know-where-you-are-going aspect of letting words lead the way.