Cinematographic reading and catalogues in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"

Walt Whitman's visual imagination was influenced by paintings, panoramas, and photography. His expansive vision reflects changes in methods of perception. Whitman was also an influence on early filmmakers, like Dziga Vertov. Vertov's "Kino-Eye" theory and Whitman's poetry reflect each other in their attempts to attain a "fresh" perception, to see the world "photogenically." Consequently, there is more than just similitude between Whitman and cinema. In fact, both are meant to be seen. Although the idea of reading Whitman "cinematographically" has been mentioned by some critics, none has suggested how this reading process is to be enacted or understood by the reader. The Reader Response theory of Wolfgang Iser is used to show that the reader, when encountering a text, is involved in a process of ideation, during which mental images are influenced by and derived in part from textual schemata and indeterminacies. The cinematographic reading is, then, highly imaginative, resulting in the creation of a "virtual" text. When examined, it can be shown how Walt Whitman's catalogues intend to carry the reader along in a process of "indirect" ideation during which the structures and images of the catalogues become realized by the reader's imagination.