Whitman’s daily witness to the bleak reality of death and dying inhibited
him from conjecturing about the satisfactions of the afterlife.
Even during the war years Whitman was abandoning his stance as
the poet of both body and soul to become almost exclusively the poet of
the soul. The watershed year for this change was 1867, two years after the
war’s end, when England’s Broadway Magazine published a group of ¤ve
lyrics depicting the soul’s eager embarkation on its spiritual journey into
the in¤nite—poems with titles like “Whispers of Heavenly Death” and
“Darest Thou Now, O Soul”—that set the tone for the soul-oriented po-
ems of the poet’s last quarter-century. Four years later when he published
the imposing “Passage to India” and a number of similarly themed poems
in a small collection, he had clearly staked out his position as the preemi-
nent poet of the soul and of the soul-journey. “Preface 1872—As a Strong
Bird on Pinions Free” hints that Whitman was also positioning himself
as the poet of the “New Theology” whose poems illustrate that “mortality”
is “but an exercise... with reference to results beyond.” Nevertheless, the
later poems do not always differentiate between the mind and the soul.
Although it is generally assumed that the mind and the emotions have
a physiological basis, a number of the later poems, including “Passage
to India,” picture the persona’s postmortem entity as dual—the “soul”
accompanied by the “self ” (which retains the faculties of the sentient
mind)—twin interlinked companions and lovers journeying to the para-
dise of their heart’s desiring. Aware that his views remain paradoxical, the
poet attempts to explain his position:
Body and mind are one; an inexplicable paradox, yet no truth
truer. The human soul stands in the centre, and all the universes
minister to it, and serve it and revolve around it. They are one
side of the whole, and it is the other side. It escapes utterly from
all limits, dogmatic standards and measurements and adjusts itself
to the ideas of God, of space, and to eternity, and sails them at
will as oceans, and ¤lls them as beds of oceans.
The varieties, contradictions, and paradoxes of the world and
of life, and even good and evil, so baf®ing to the super¤cial ob-
server, and so often leading to despair, sullenness or in¤delity,
become a series of in¤nite radiations and waves of the one sea-
like universe of divine action and progress, never stopping, never
hasting.^1210 / Introduction