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Passage to Less than India: Structure and Meaning in Whitman's “Passage to India”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Extract
THE GREAT APPEAL of “Passage to India” is understandable. Following the Civil War and the publication of the 1867 (fourth) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman, close to fifty, had become increasingly preoccupied in his poetry with “thoughts on the deep themes of Death & Immortality.” While he had, of course, explored these themes in his earlier poetry, this strong emphasis on the “universal” was something new and it was to continue to the end of his career. He answered a request from the English Broadway Magazine for a poem by sending five separate lyrics, under the group title “Whispers of Heavenly Death.” Published in 1868, these were, in addition to the title poem, “Darest Thou Now ? Soul,” “The Last Invocation,” “Pensive and Faltering,” and “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” which was actually composed in 1862–63 and reworked at this time with emphasis on the soul rather than on its earlier “Calamus” motif. Quite self-conscious about the spiritual direction his poetry was taking now, he indicated that he would make “no more attempts at smart sayings, or scornful criticisms, or harsh comments on persons or actions, or private and public affairs . . . never attempt puns or plays upon words, or utter sarcastic comments.” And around this time he also indicated that in the next edition of Leaves he would give special emphasis to “religious themes.”1 Whitman was entering the final phase of his career. He had come the full way around. In some dozen years, the poet of the body had given way to the poet of the soul, the poet of intense nationalism to the poet of internationalism and the cosmic.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973
References
1 See Harold W. Blodgett, “Whitman's ‘Whisperings,‘ ”WWR, 8 (1962), 12–16.
2 Fredson Bowers, “The Earliest Manuscript of Whitman's ‘Passage to India’ and Its Notebook,” BNYPL, 61 (1957), 319. Bowers reconstructs the composition of the MS and provides diplomatic transcripts of the MS, pp.319–48, and the Notebook, pp. 348–52, both in the Oscar Lion Collection in the New York Public Library. Page references to this article will appear parenthetically in the text. The Notebook contains preliminary jottings about the poem and a few trial lines. The Lion MS. Underwent “at least two major and thorough revisory processes. .. . Whether each, or either, of these was performed as one process or more than one is not certain” (p. 323).
There can be little doubt that the Lion MS. served as copy for the final MS form of the poem (which bears further alterations), in the Houghton Library at Harvard Univ.from which, following Whitman's general practice, the final MS was set up in preliminary proof sheets. (Whitman often used proof sheets for revisory purposes, much as a contemporary author would use a typescript.) “The relation of the Lion and of the Harvard manuscripts presents no difficulty, for time and time again the readings in the Lion manuscript arrived at as a result of revision appear without alteration in the Harvard to be repeated in the proof sheets and the printed edition” (p. 319). In turn the proof sheets, with minor changes, served as printer's copy for the poem, put in final order in early March 1870. See Fredson Bowers, “The Manuscript of Whitman's ‘Passage to India,‘ ” MP, 51 (1953), 102–17, for an account of the Harvard MS. and proof sheets and a diplomatic transcript of the text.
“Passage to India” was first published in 1871 as the title poem of a paperbound volume containing 75 poems, 24 new. The volume was added as an annex to the 1871–72 and 1876 editions of Leaves of Grass and finally incorporated among the poems of the 1881 edition, where Whitman settled on the final arrangement of the poems in Leaves. Few substantive changes were made in the text of “Passage to India” from initial to final publication. For convenience, lines in the Lion MS. will be keyed to corresponding section and line numbers in the familiar final version of the poem, in the Comprehensive Reader's Edition of Leaves of Grass, ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York : New York Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 410–21, cited hereafter as RLG.
3 To my knowledge, only 5 critics have challenged the widely held belief that “Passage to India” is one of Whitman's masterpieces. To them (along with much of his postCivil War poetry) “Passage to India” is an artistic failure. They are Newton Arvin, Whitman (New York : Macmillan, 1938), pp. 225–26; Richard Chase, Walt Whitman Reconsidered (New York: Sloan Associates, 1955), pp. 147–49; Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961; rev. 1965), p. 173; Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (Boston: Houghton, 1968), pp. 179–80; and Edwin Havil and Miller, Walt Whitman's Poetry:A Psychological Journey (Boston: Houghton, 1968), pp.210–21. Although they approach “Passage to India” from different angles, in essence they share the belief that Whitman as philosophical poet had become rather vague and diffuse and that his art, esp. in “Passage to India,” had become flaccid. They arrived at their conclusions, which the present article shares, without attention to the overall structural development of “Passage to India,” made possible by Bowers' article on the Lion MS. and its Notebook. Stanley K. Coffman, Jr., “Form and Meaning in Whitman's ‘Passage to India,‘ ” PMLA, 70 (1955), 337–49, mainly sympathetic to the poem, makes an important criticism of Whitman's handling of the past in relation to the present, discussed below.
4 “Not you alone proud truths of the world” was an 11-line poem entitled “Fables,” found among the Valentine MSS., most of the holograph poems incorporated in the 1860 (3rd) edition of Leaves of Grass (Whitman's Manuscripts, Leaves of Grass (I860), A Parallel Text, ed. Fredson Bowers, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955, p. 257). The Valentine MSS. are in the C. Waller Barrett Collection, the Univ. of Virginia. “Fables” was not published in the 1860 edition. There is no way of knowing whether it had been composed for the 3rd edition or of dating its composition prior to its insertion as a proof paste-on in the Lion MS. Bowers (Whitman's Manuscripts . . . (I860), ii. 3, p. xxiv) conjectures that it would not seem to have been withheld from the 1860 edition but composed later.
“O vast Rondure” was completed in Dec. 1868 (Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer, 1955; rev. 1967, New York: New York Univ. Press, pp. 410, n. 113, 412), probably before “Passage” had taken shape in the Notebook. Whitman submitted the poem to both the London Fortnightly Review and the Atlantic Monthly. It was accepted by the former for its April 1869 number, but never printed. See Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, ii (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1961), 75,77. As with “Fables,” “O vast Rondure” was set up in proof sheets and later incorporated in the Lion MS.
5 The Lion MS. differs substantively from the Valentine “Fables” version, as follows: in 1. 19 read “proud” for “O”; 1. 20 was a fresh addition; in 1. 21, “Asia's, Africa's fables!” was added; in 1. 23, “fables—the mythical” following “The deep-diving” was canceled; and in 1. 24, “and newer” following “elder” was canceled.
6 Coffman, “Whitman's ‘Passage to India,‘ ” pp. 348–49. If Whitman had not canceled his addition in the Lion MS. of “primitive” to the line (26) that Coffman refers to, it would have read “O you fables, spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known, primitive, mounting to heaven!”
7 So, for the same reason, is sec. 7 (RLG, 11. 165–74; Lion MS., 11. 170–75, 237–38), which follows the same idea as “Fables” and concludes “Back, back to wisdom's birth, to innocent intuitions, / Again with fair creation.” Sec. 7 would further support the belief that Whitman had not sufficiently thought out the implications to “Passage to India” of innocent intuitions as opposed to “increasingly meaningful intuitions based upon growing knowledge of the physical world” (Coffman, p. 349), although Coffman did not have sec. 7 in mind when he made this observation.
8 A facsimile of the MS of “O vast Rondure” containing Whitman's instructions to the printer appears in The Gathering of the Forces, ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black, i (New York and London: Putnam, 1920), 206. The facsimile holograph was in 3 numbered stanzas. The stanza numbers had undoubtedly been included in the proof-sheet version and trimmed when Whitman pasted sections consecutively in the Lion MS., leaving room for the insertion of additional lines, discussed below. Line 92 had concluded st. 1 ; 1. 103, st. 2. The Lion MS. proof paste-ons differed substantively from the holograph only in 1. 102, where “this” replaced “the.”
The following substantive changes were made by Whitman by hand on the proof pasteons : in 1.86, read “0” for “Thou”; in 1. 91, “ever-” following “With” was canceled and replaced by “some,” in turn canceled; in 1. 95, “ever exploring” was added; in 1. 109, the opening words were cut away (“But haply” in the facsimile), with “finally” capitalized to begin the line; in 1. 112 “Then” preceding “all” was deleted; in 1. 115 “whole” was added, and “aye” and “completely” preceding “this” and “justified” were deleted. Line 116 was revised from “Trinitas divine shall gloriously accomplish and compact itself.” In 1. 116 Whitman had trimmed the proof following the canceled “itself” to accommodate his additions to the line. Considering the almost exact substantive transmission of the holograph to the proof paste-ons, it is most unlikely that before trimming 1. 116 differed from its initial version. (The Harvard MS. does not help, where the printed line was trimmed following “compact.”)
9 Bowers, “Passage to India,” MP, p. 107,1. 109.
10 For sec. 7, see n. 7.
11 An uncanceled fragment following “done,)” in the text is dropped here.
12 “Grounds for suspicion may exist. . . that the insertion of ? Soul' so altered the original ending as to require a copy to be made, with alterations, of the final verses [i.e., 227–61] as they had presumably been first written out… before the insertion.” The physical evidence suggests “the possibility that the Lion manuscript had originally been written out complete. . . but that the end was recopied and partly changed as a consequence of the insertion of the independent poem ? Soul' ” (p. 322; also see pp. 326–27, 329).
13 Perhaps for the same reason, Whitman had earlier successfully integrated a 10-line independent poem in “A Carol of Harvest, for 1867” (final title, “The Return of the Heroes”). See Fredson Bowers, “The Manuscript of Walt Whitman's ? Carol of Harvest, for 1867,' ”MP, 52 (1954), 29–52.
14 See Richard E. Amacher, “Whitman's ‘Passage to India,‘ ”Expl, 9 (1950), 23, and Ruth Stauffer, Expl, 9 (1951), 50. By April 1870, when he offered “Passage to India” for magazine publication, Whitman was thinking only in terms of two “modern engineering masterpieces, the Pacific Railroad & the Suez Canal,” to “make of them as heights & apices whereby to reach freest, widest, loftiest spiritual fields” (Correspondence, li, 96–97).
15 Moving away from his earlier emphasis in Leaves of Grass on the rhythms of native American speech, Whitman had leaned rather heavily on traditional poetic diction from Drum-Taps (1865) to the end of his career. See Roger Asselineau, The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Book, trans, by the author and Burton L. Cooper (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 225–38.
16 Edwin H. Miller, Whitman's Poetry, p. 219.
17 There are also a number of flat, pedestrian lines, of which the one closing sec. 3 is perhaps the worst: “Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel.”
18 I was aided in the preparation of this article by a City Univ. of New York Summer Research Grant.