![]() “Passage to India” was a child of his tortured soul.įor Whitman, the spiritual journey incorporated not only the primal sources of Christianity, but also the core of all ancient religions. During the American Civil War, he nursed the injured, tirelessly emerging from the carnage vowing to live a “cleansed” life, epitomising the New America that was coming to birth.įROM THIS fecund mix came a poet whose radical free verse seethed with visceral images of politics, race, slavery, patriotism, love, and pantheism. In the 1970s, the gay- liberation movement adopted him as a poet and icon. He extolled homosexual love so blatantly that a number of poems were banned. Walt Whitman grew up to be of bearded and shaggy appearance, modelling himself on Christ, though wearing a rakish wide-brimmed hat and outlandish clothes. His brother was institutionalised, his sister endured a disastrous marriage, and his younger brother took to drink, married a prostitute, and died young. Walt Whitman was born on Long Island on, into a profoundly dysfunctional family, the son of an alcoholic Quaker carpenter. So the passage to India is transformed into a symbolic journey into the heart of God. The soul, “that actual me”, must venture beyond engineering feats towards a spiritual union with the divine. Overtly it is a paean to humankind’s mastery in forging the canal, laying a transatlantic cable, and completing the Union Pacific railroad.ĭig deeper, and the poem blossoms into a spiritual journey impelled forward by a surging optimism, and incandescent with religious conviction. It revolutionised the mercantile world, and fired the American poet Walt Whitman to immortalise the occasion with his poem “Passage to India”. ![]() The last DIVOT was dug and the Suez Canal opened to shipping on 17 November 1869.
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