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I've been thinking about the connection between the abstract quality of Whitman and the abstract quality of the visual art we've looked at over the last two weeks, because they don't seem the same to me. Someone (I've forgotten who) suggested in Dalke's Thurday section that writing is less abstract/ less likely to be abstract because it is in words, and words we read are inherently supposed to have meaning. We didn't really pursue the subject. Professor Dalke also brought up, during our reading out loud, that Leaves of Grass doesn't really have a chronological order.

It's true that we can put together fragments of Leaves of Grass in different orders and still have the same impact, but the fact remains that writing, unlike painting, must be read in a chronological order. We read a word, then the next, then the next. We can only really "see" one word at a time, even when skimming, even when trying to let the poem wash over us. I think this is another reason that writing is less abstract than other forms of art, where it easier to step back and gain an overall "impression"

So while we can rearrange Leaves of Grass without disturbing any traditional sense of narrative, it will still change it completely. Because we, as readers, have to go linearly we can only relate each new section to the ones before it, and not the ones that come later-- at least in the first reading.