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Form and Meaning in Whitman's “Passage to India”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Stanley K. Coffman Jr.
Stanley K. Coffman Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of Oklahoma, Norman
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Extract

In Democratic Vistas Whitman defined a poem as an “image-making work.” If we are to judge by what he says in the prefaces about the function of poetry, the image to which he referred would be, in very general terms, the Ideal by which a nation is enabled to realize itself (as individuals and en masse), or, more particularly, the self of the individual poet, which is presented as archetype. The drift of the interpretation, in either case, is away from the esthetic; it moves instead toward areas that may be variously described as psychological, religious, or metaphysical. The tendency toward the esthetic is there, however; present in such a definition is a basis for speculating upon the kinds of imagery Whitman uses and the extent to which he relies upon the expressive possibilities of this traditional device of the poet—the relation between images and the final, single image.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 3 , June 1955 , pp. 337 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

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References

1 Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. Sculley Dradley (New York, 1949), p. 512.

2 “A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads,” Leaves of Grass (Inclusive Ed.), ed. Emory Holloway (New York, 1948), p. 527.

3 Ibid., p. 535. I have also used Holloway for the text of “Passage to India.”

4 I should like to acknowledge an indebtedness to a doctoral dissertation by Sister Mary Bernetta Quinn, O.S.F., “Metamorphosis in Modern American Poetry” (Univ. of Wisconsin, 1952). In this study, a part of which was recently published in the Sewanee Rev., LX (1952), 230–252, the author traces a principle of metamorphosis through the work of certain modern American poets. She does not mention Emerson's discussion of the principle, nor Whitman's use of it, but her excellent analyses of the poems, showing how the principle is translated into formal expression, has been of great assistance to me in defining its formal character in “Passage to India.”

5 Essays (Oxford, 1927), pp. 272, 275.

6 Wall Whitman Handbook (Chicago, 1946), pp. 196-197.

7 Compare the imagery of the catalogues in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” which is an interweaving of light and motion for a similar effect.

8 “Modern Puetry,” Tile Collected Poems of Hart Crone, ed. Waldo Frank (New York, 1946), p. 179.