While I’m having a stab at poetry criticism, someone asked me why I liked Whitman’s ‘Passage to India’ so much. This is what I sent them.
On Passage to India, I suppose it’s that most optimistic poems are trite – I really don’t like Wordsworth’s Daffodils! – or are about happiness from enduring the unendurable. Passage to India is hopeful that there need be no division between our spiritual and technological achievements; it’s ambitious (massively so!) but doesn’t bemoan the world. It won’t necessarily be so, and Whitman knows the damage that the love of scientific advancement can do if it has no other purpose, but he believes that we can use achievements like the Suez Canal or the telegraph across the Atlantic or a ferry across a river for the good of humanity and the good of individual humans by finding whatever in us wants and longs to be more than we are. I know a ferry seems mundane, but I think for Whitman it’s celebrating that we found a way to cross something that was in our way so we could know what was over there, wherever that is. I know there are problems with the poem, not least the Orientalism and the teleology, and I know that Whitman’s style is even more bananas here than usual, but I actually believe he thought that we could reach a better version of our selves. I do like that Whitman, at his best, just does not care what anyone thinks about his archaic language, his asides, or the impossibly broad sweep of what he’s doing. Some poems read, some speak, some sing, some chant. Passage to India dances, and doesn’t care if anyone’s watching or not.