Whitman, Walt,--1819-1892--Criticism and interpretation

The war poetry of Randall Jarrell reflects themes found in the war
poetry of Walt Whitman and Thomas Hardy. The period represented ranges
from the Napoleonic Wars through World War II. Hardy wrote about five
wars and experienced four in his lifetime; Whitman experienced the
American Civil War; and Jarrell experienced World War II. Nature,
often seen by the poets as "wounded" and sometimes complementary to
war, is important to the poets, who incorporated her as healer, as
absorber of the dead, and as a symbolic background for war. The three
poets wrote about people in war. Often the soldiers were helpless
child victims who withstood the rigors of the military by establishing
camaraderie or escaping through dreams and death. Advancing technology
brought war, with its machinery and informational immediacy, close to
civilians, affecting them and their soldiers as never before.

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.