Melville's Antithetical Muse E-Book

Juana Celia Djelal

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Biblioteca Javier Coy d'Estudis Nord-Americans
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 261

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This study analyses Melville's poetics of opposition and focuses on local, thematic, rhetorical and technical aspects of the author's poems. Melville's tense relationship with his country rehearsed in his novels is condensed in the poetry analysed here. As a poet, Melville is, incredible as it may seem, a voice crying out in the wilderness, with the extensive tradition of the Western classics and the Bible echoed in these poems. The works analysed in this book have been selected from the three collections of poetry published during Melville's lifetime: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces and Timoleon Etc. The dissent that emanates from this body of poetry underlines Melville's non-conformism to the orthodox expectations of late nineteenth-century America.

Leseprobe

MELVILLE’S ANTITHETICAL MUSE

READING THE SHORTER POEMS

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americanshttp://www.uv.es/bibjcoy

DirectoraCarme Manuel

MELVILLE’S ANTITHETICAL MUSE

READING THE SHORTER POEMS

Juana Celia Djelal

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americansUniversitat de València

Melville’s Antithetical Muse: Reading the Shorter Poems

©Juana Celia Djelal

1ª edición de 2013

Reservados todos los derechos Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial

ISBN: 978-84-9134-151-2

Imagen de la portada: Juana Celia DjelalIlustraciones del interior: Sophia de Vera HöltzDiseño de la cubierta: Celso Hernández de la Figuera

Publicacions de la Universitat de Valènciahttp://[email protected]

Si te dan papel rayado, escribe de través.(If they give you lined paper, turn it and write across the lines.)

Juan Ramón Jiménez

Table of Contents

Prefatory Note and Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

CHAPTER IThe Fortunes of Melville’s Reception as Poet

CHAPTER IIAll in All: Melville’s Poetics of Unity

CHAPTER IIIHarping on the Winds of War

CHAPTER IVThe Other Sailors: Implacable Revenants

CHAPTER VThe Promise of Peniel: Melville’s Agonistic Art

Bibliography

Index

Prefatory Noteand Acknowledgements

My first encounter with Melville’s poetry provoked wonder at not having known such a corpus existed. Curiosity about its neglect led to investigations that have resulted in this volume. This study examines Melville’s oppositional poetics, the contrariety of his approach to writing poetry distinct from the orthodox expectations in the U.S. of the late-nineteenth century. The poems discussed here, selected from the three collections of poetry published in Melville’s lifetime, reflect his oppositional stance. Though the purview of this study does not include Melville’s longest poem, the 18,000 verse Clarel, readings of several lengthy poems are included.

The poems have engaged the interest of scholars, largely since the 1990s and generally in the context of nineteenth-century studies or broader studies of U.S. poetry. Books dedicated exclusively to Melville’s poetry are few. This study, with its focus on topical, thematic, rhetorical and technical aspects of poems from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea Pieces, and Timoleon Etc., hopes to expand interest in the poems and widen their readership.

* * * *

My heartfelt thanks to Carme Manuel, editor extraordinaire of Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans, whose warm congeniality and enthusiasm would have found resounding favor with Melville. The sun smiled brightly the day she revealed that she had translated Melville’s Battle-Pieces to Catalan, “sotmesos a un millor domini / que el domini d’un mateix.” And to Dra. Carmen González, U.S. historian, enduring gratitude for a serendipitous introduction that has made a mark on work and friendships.

I am most grateful to the cordial librarians of The Newberry Library, Chicago, The New York Public Library, and Houghton Library, Harvard University, for their proficient and courteous assistance.

Warm thanks to the colleagues in Melville studies, and especially to John Bryant, Paweł Jędrzejko, Wyn Kelley, Giorgio Mariani, Sandy Marovitz, Gordon Poole and Basem Ra’ad for their support of my work over the years. And to those Melvilleans, remembered and revered, generous in spirit and deed, whose conversation and enthusiasm for my investigations, in their incipient stages and beyond, has served as professional and personal boon exceeding the limit of their days: Hennig Cohen, Harrison Hayford, Jill Barnum (Gidmark), Stanton Garner and Douglas Robillard.

Beyond earthly chronometrics, I am indebted to Allen Mandelbaum for his arts of poetry, cicerone through landscapes of Vergil, of Dante, who once confided––In the next life, a jazz musician, a basketball player––Eternal master, now, of beat and bounce.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge those friends and colleagues whose good cheer, interest and appreciation of this project have made pleasurable labors even more gratifying: Rafael Alenda, Barbara Alfano, Helena Buescu, Jack Catlin, Greta Cune, Jill Derickson, Nergis Erturk, Carmen González, Paul Harvey, Tawny Holm, John Kirby, Brian Lennon, Renae Mitchell, Leonard Neufeldt, Gonzalo Rubio, Manini Nayar Samarth.

My deepest gratitude to Aixé Sophia Djelal, a patient, loving spirit above all others, downright hilarious besides, and to Matt Proctor, master of harmonies and multiple harmonics.

Of the innumerable ways in which I might acknowledge Djelal Kadir, friend in the profound etymological sense, best here to prefer an elegant solution: Pace tua Alighieri/Guinizzelli, I inscribe these labors to “il miglior fabbro”: “leu sui Arnaut qu’amas l’aura: E chatz le lebre ab lo bou: E nadi contra suberna.”

Abbreviations

BB

Billy Budd, Sailor, An Inside Narrative

BP

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War

C

Correspondence

J

Journals

JM

John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea Pieces

PA

Pierre, or the Ambiguities

T

Timoleon Etc.

* * * * *

All citations of Melville’s poems are from the facsimile editions listed in the Bibliography. The editorial apparatus of the Northwestern-Newberry edition, Published Poems, in the series The Writings of Herman Melville, has served as an invaluable reference.

Early versions of portions of several chapters appeared in the following journals: “All in All: Melville’s Poetics of Unity.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 41.3 (1995): 219-237; “‘After the Pleasure Party’: Melville’s Classical Agon.” Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 17.3 (1997): 207-215; “Melville’s Bridal Apostrophe: Rhetorical Conventions of the Connubium.” Melville Society Extracts 110 (1997): 1-5; “Melville’s Poetic Compass.” The CEA Critic 63.1 (2000): 61-70.

Chapter I

The Fortunes of Melville’s Reception as Poet

This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

At the end of 1866, forty-seven years old, at restless loose ends and much in need of a steady occupation, Herman Melville applied through an old friend, and received a government appointment as inspector of customs, a post he held for nineteen years until his retirement at age sixty-six. His writing during this period was mainly poetry. Taxed as his earlier writing career had been, Melville proved himself incorruptible in his post as inspector, refusing all bribes, carrying out his duties in impeccable fashion.

By the Gilded Age, custom houses were networks of bribery and corruption. New York handled five-sixths of the total United States imposts, and its collectorship controlled more patronage than any other office in America. The New York Custom House, largest single source of American state finance, was “the commercial heart of the American people.” Patronage appointees, bribed to let goods through the custom house, demanded the spoils of office. Conspiring with importers, they frustrated the honest inspection of merchandise and the efficient collection of revenue. “Surrounded by low veniality, he puts it all quietly aside,” wrote Melville’s brother-in-law, John Hoadley, “quietly returning money that has been thrust into his pocket… quietly steadfastly doing his duty.” “The Custom House,” Melville had written Hawthorne in 1851, only permitted “unencumbered travelers” to pass through. (Rogin 292)

His unyielding personal incorruptibility notwithstanding, when he ventures into the realm of poetry, Herman Melville is read as someone else. His more than thirty years of poetry writing could not persuade a nineteenth- and, too, a twentieth-century reading public that a writer’s various voices do not betray steadfastness. There had been general critical agreement on the recidivation of Melville’s career. He is not perceived as a poet seeking after completion, expansive in his sensibility, including and vindicating the “prose” writer. The poet Melville is encountered, briefly engaged, skirmished, vanquished, and interred.

Rendered silent by a reading audience that rejected his prose writing by pronouncing it other than what they desired or expected, Melville deployed disruptive meter and renegade rhyme schemes as his means of protest. The critical register, in turn, runs from ridicule of Melville’s rhyme to terror of his tone; it expounds upon failure of form, insolence of image, and mediocrity of metaphor. On his part, Melville, in his first published volume, wrote of war and his writing figured as an act of war against convention. If the modernist ethos consists in the questioning of norms and orthodoxies and in the stress of programmatic antitheses, Melville’s reception and his equally antithetical response carry the signature of a precocious modernist struggle. The hostilities drove him into deeper silence.1

Herman Melville, “the democratic writer betrayed by democracy; the artist betrayed by art” (Bryant xvii), became one of the literary world’s dispossessed. Visionary in his fervent concern for a country about which he cared deeply, he wrote poetry of confrontation reflecting his country’s salient concerns. From his readers’ point of view, however, there was no need for this sort of pronouncement on the nation’s enterprising nature, certainly no need to betray the active principles that undergirded the domestic and international status quo and its consensual investments. Good reason to silence such “treasonous” scripture, subversive in content and intention.

Both as instructive and destructive irony, Melville’s anti-war stance in his first volume of poems, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, is a key element in his war with his culture. There was a danger in Melville’s anti-war sentiment evident in his commemoration of the Civil War. Bent on keeping viable the bellicose option, the status quo saw the value in silencing such an espousal; war was to be perpetuated in order to preserve the truth of the founding documents of the business of Empire. Popularization of Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War could subvert justifications for waging war, could serve to threaten the political sway that demanded a blood covenant as guarantor of preservation of freedom.

In the decades following publication of Battle-Pieces (1866) and Clarel (1876), Melville published John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces (1888) and Timoleon Etc. (1891), both in limited editions of twenty-five copies for family and friends. Limited publication granted a modicum of defense, if not outright control, over total exclusion and, no doubt, a certain peace of mind, freed from the specter of reviews and lack of sales. And there are poems never published in Melville’s lifetime, in the unfinished Burgundy Club book, the collection Weeds and Wildings Chiefly: With a Rose or Two, and “Billy in the Darbies,” that serves as coda to Billy Budd, Sailor, discovered and published posthumously. In “exile,” outside of the constraints and limitations of his literary past, Melville created an alternative life for himself, became the ex-centric and moving center of a new community of his own creation, his world of poetry.

Reaction to Melville’s poetry ranged from dismissal of his effort to frank admiration. Between these extremes, Melville has been given psycho-sexual, religious, and misanthropic readings. In his various guises, the atheist-Unitarian-Calvinist mystic as bitter–pacifist–rebel poet has outdistanced his critics to pass beyond the prosaic pale. My reading aims, in part, to examine traces Melville’s poetry has left on the language and customs that recognize it as a precursor, ambivalent or otherwise. Melville’s poetic corpus contains deliberate formal experimentation, some autobiography, and copious literary recollection. The poems are marked by directness, semantic density, dexterous disposition of syntactic breaks, unnerving shifts, and insinuating rhythms; his system reveals intricate lexical and conceptual semantic linkages. In light of Melville’s heavy annotation of Emerson’s “The Poet,” he “probably shared the conception elaborated there of the dynamic interrelation of poet, poem, reader, and object: all working together, cooperating in the creation of newer and higher forms” (Lewis 53n2).

Melville’s vicissitudes as social poet began with the poetry’s publication. Numerous unsigned reviews appeared in noted newspapers and magazines of the day. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, published in New York in August of 1866, was appraised variously during the period from September 1866 through February 1867. Calling the volume “a good and patriotic action” (Branch 388), the critic went on to comment:

Nature did not make him a poet. His pages contain at best little more than the rough ore of poetry. Here and there gleams of imaginative power shine out like the grains of gold in a mass of quartz… There are some of them in which it is difficult to discover rhythm, measure, or consonance of rhyme. The thought is often involved and obscure. The sentiment is weakened by incongruous imagery. We quote the first piece in the volume lest our criticism be thought too severe. (Branch 390)

The poem quoted there is “The Portent,” perhaps the strongest emblematic statement of political upheaval, combined with a singular depiction of the gallows, to come out of the Civil War. Writing in the New York World, Richard Henry Stoddard stated:

[t]he habit of his mind is not lyric, but historical, and the genre of historic poetry in which he most congenially expatiates finds rythm [sic] not a help but a hindrance. The exigencies of rhyme hamper him still more, and against both of these trammels his vigorous thought habitually recalcitrates, refusing from time to time the harness which by adopting the verse-form it had voluntarily assumed… We might go on to instance such technical blemishes as the rhyming of ‘law’ and ‘Shenandoah,’ ‘more’ and ‘Kenesaw,’ but we forbear, lest we should seem carping at a book which, without having one poem of entire artistic ensemble in it, possesses numerous passages of beauty and power. (Branch 393-394)

Stoddard’s need to “forbear” from citing slant rhyme as “technical blemish” appears generous, his rhetoric transparent.

An unsigned review in the Atlantic Monthly, February 1867, sought to damn Melville with praise:

Mr. Melville’s skill is so great that we fear he has not often felt the things of which he writes, since with all his skill he fails to move us. In some respects we find his poems admirable. He treats events as realistically as one can to whom they seem to have presented themselves as dreams; but at last they remain vagaries, and are none the more substantial because they have a modern speech and motion. (Branch 396)

Citing from the May 1865 poem “The Muster,” the same reviewer reveals his own poetic sensibility, praising dreamlike vagrancy and the insubstantial:

We have never seen anywhere so true and beautiful a picture as the following of that sublime and thrilling,—a great body of soldiers marching:—

The bladed guns are gleaming—

Drift in lengthened trim,

Files on files for hazy miles

Nebulously dim.

These auspicious reviews have provided a legacy for our own day. There are few books, and about a dozen studies that include essays in collections devoted exclusively to Melville’s poetry, though the number of articles has increased in the past two decades. The twentieth- and early twenty-first-century reception has been one of qualified praise, lauding individual poems and gesturing benignly toward the corpus as a whole, though recently there has been some commitment to more than a reticent reading of the poetry.

In the twentieth century, the poems prompted divergent appraisals. In his volume, The Continuity of American Poetry, Roy Harvey Pearce observed,

[H]e stopped writing prose, and turned to a frankly high-brow, unpopular kind of poetry, publishing at the end of his career two volumes of verse, privately printed, in editions of twenty-five copies each. (It is not of sufficient body or strength, nor of sufficient influence, to have a place in this narrative, I should note). (Pearce 205)

Pearce’s parenthetical detraction sums up his assessment, one echoed by Alfred Kazin: “Melville’s poems seem to offer constrictions of his prose habits; his poetic diction hangs like wax fruit. He never bothered to make poems evolve; they were his conclusions. They were the product of a man arguing with himself, convincing himself by laborious bareness that he was in port at last” (Kazin 840-841).

One might say, however, that Melville is a poet of recuperation; his retrospective poetry recovers the urgency of the past, and thereby affirms the status of the present. His poetry is less a stirring up of the past than the past stirring within the poet. Willard Thorpe writes of the invigorating “strength, sobriety, and almost embarrassing sincerity” of Melville’s verse: “A few of his poems, among them surely, ‘The Portent,’ ‘Malvern Hill,’ and the Epilogue to Clarel, must be included with the best we have to contribute to the world’s store of memorable verse” (Thorpe xcvi).

Robert Penn Warren, who himself turned almost exclusively to writing poetry in his later years, had genuine regard for the poems; he saw them as emblems of Melville’s personal struggles, even, as in the case of “The Tuft of Kelp,” as epigram for his life. Warren evaluated the poetry in broad terms, addressing Melville’s thematic concerns, relating them to Melville’s own Victorian age while forging the important link to modernism. The hope “to find a surrogate for religious values—that recurrent theme in Victorian poetry” (37), is viewed against the backdrop of Clarel, Melville’s eighteen-thousand-verse poem of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, in which he

… sets a group of characters who carry on, in their beings and by word, the debate of the modern world. The poem is an important document of our own modernity, as it is a document of Melville’s own mind. It is, in fact, a precursor of The Waste Land, with the same basic image, the same flickering contrasts of the past and the present, the same charade of belief and unbelief. (Warren 36)

Warren’s favorable response had its precedents in the Melville Revival of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1917 Carl Van Doren contributed a brief essay to the Cambridge History of American Literature, then under his editorship, offering the first twentieth-century appreciation of Melville’s work. Watson Branch, noting this acknowledgement of Melville, proffers an explanation for the interest in Melville: a biographical concern with his writings:

Because the three decades of disregard for Melville had resulted in the loss of much biographical material, the critics mined his works for autobiographical ‘facts’ and revelations of his personal character; then they used these ‘facts’ and discoveries in their appraisals of the author and his books. (Branch 44)

Merton M. Sealts, Jr., in his invaluable study, Melville’s Reading, reads Melville’s poetry primarily for its traditional and classical affiliations, notably its links with Plato. Otherwise, Sealts takes the poetry as one more clue to Melville’s biography, especially his intellectual history, rather than as a worthy contender in the realm of poetry and poetic discourse

Biographical interest and Melville’s intellectual history serve as justification for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ interest in “the man and his work.” This contrasts to the late nineteenth–century’s dismissal of Melville’s unsentimental, dark “pessimism,” and its suggestion that Melville was writing of human nature rather than of the man-made realities that plague a society after a war. His meditation on universals did not pertain to the life of humans in their world and Americans in their culture. At a time of pressing worldly concerns and immediacy, Melville’s expansive vision was neither embraced by the generation of writers that followed him, nor discerned as relevant to an urgent present. As Granville Hicks remarks,

The writers of the post-war period could no more have brought into their greedy, machine-dominated, expansive age the glories of the Golden Day than the first settlers could have carried across the Atlantic the glories of the Elizabethan drama. They lived in a new world, and they had to explore that world for themselves… The post-war generation not only failed to rise to the level of the heroes of the past; it brought them down upon its own plane. (Hicks 11)

William H. Shurr’s wide-ranging assessment of Melville’s poetry, with its broad and finely woven concerns, grants Melville a recognition long and grudgingly withheld. He offers readings significant in their literary and historic context, distinct from the assessment of Melville: The Critical Heritage; the penultimate section of the editor’s introduction is titled “Toward Oblivion: The Poetry.” Unlike Branch, Shurr pursues, via hints and quoted lines of verse, “the dark side of Melville’s moon.” He states that “Melville’s conscious themes seem to clash with intuitive feelings.” In writing of his rose poems in Weeds and Wildings Chiefly: With a Rose or Two, Shurr senses a perversity in Melville’s dedication of the volume to his wife, who was allergic to roses and had to be gone from home during the pollen season to avoid “rose fever.” It is not unlikely, however, that Melville wrote the poems in her absence and, versed as he was in the language of flowers, used love’s bloom as emblem for his wife while lamenting their separation. There is confirmation of this possibility:

[Melville’s] greatest desire seems to have been to live quietly, and, at some time after Elizabeth decided that she was not suffering from “a rose cold” but “the hay fever,” he began to grow roses… [they] provided him with companionship when Elizabeth and Bessie [one of their daughters] were away during the long months of summer. It was probably at this time, during the years when he realized he had begun “aging at three-score” that he began writing the rose poems he left in manuscript after his death… His flowers were closely connected, in his mind, with Elizabeth; and he was doubtless fully conscious that they filled a gap which her long absences left in his life. (Howard 316-317)

Despite his having spent intense months and years outside of the family circle, critics did not grant Melville the possibility of desiring and needing to explore modes of expression outside the purview of marriage and the family relationship. Many critics seem to cast Melville rather strictly in the role of family man to the point of negating the wholeness of a life lived elsewhere, both physically and imaginatively.2

Assessments other than biographical come from writers engaged with issues for whom the poems instantiate their broader concerns. Muriel Rukeyser, Edmund Wilson, and Daniel Aaron, in writing of war and poetry, focus on Melville’s poetic process and its topical preoccupations. Rukeyser contextualizes Melville thus:

American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict… Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know… It is not until we reach, in our history, the poems of Melville—and I always except here the Indian chants, unknown to earlier times than this—that the conflict is open, and turned to music… The Civil War turned him into a poet who saw aspects of wars to come, veteran of a knowledge in some ways strange to his time. (Rukeyser 68-69)

More specific than Rukeyser, Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore, writing of the confederate soldier of mythical proportion, Colonel John S. Mosby, summons Melville’s “A Scout Toward Aldie”:

This is one of Melville’s most ambitious pieces in verse, and, as a poet, he is not quite up to it. His complicated stanza form, his knotted and jolting style and his elliptical way of telling his story—which seem somewhat to derive from Browning—are really the kind of thing that requires a master to bring it off. But as a story, “The Scout Toward Aldie” is tightly organized and well contrived, and it effectively creates suspense… This long piece, a short story in verse, was included by him in a volume called Battle-Pieces, which otherwise consists of poems of a different kind. Some people admire these poems more than the present writer, and they are certainly more interesting than most of the verse that was written about the war; yet, with the notable exception of the Scout, they seem to me not really poetry for the same fundamental reasons… The celebration of current battles by poets who have not taken part in them has produced some of the emptiest verse that exists. (Wilson 324, 479)

In The Unwritten War, Daniel Aaron, in response to Wilson, explains the basis for Melville’s Battle-Pieces:

The episodes of the war itself… engaged his imagination less than their latent meaning for America’s past and future, and he relied, as he had in many of his other books, upon published sources to provide the stuff for his poetic designs: newspaper and magazine reports, paintings and sketches, and especially “the comprehensive history of this struggle” as presented in The Rebellion Record, which sifted “fact from fiction and rumor” and separated the “poetical and npicturesque aspects, the noble and characteristic incidents… from the graver and more important documents. If his poems lack the vividness and excitement of a felt occasion struck off at the moment of its occurrence, the best of them are happily free of the attitudinizing and self-consciousness often afflicting occasional verse. What he loses in immediacy, he gains in penetration. Melville’s War unfolds under the aspect of eternity.” (Aaron 78-79)

The fate of Melville’s verse was generally dealt severe blows by critics who routinely relegated acknowledgment of the poetry to an epilogue or endnotes. Roy Harvey Pearce’s comments, cited above, exemplify the sort of academic private aesthetic fiat, based on unexamined assumptions and a partially examined subject. This continues with Alan Lebowitz’s, Progress Into Silence: A Study of Melville’s Heroes (1970), whose assessment conforms with that of Pearce. Lebowitz states: “Even accepting the estimate, the achievement, while substantial enough, is hardly striking for thirty years of work and certainly not commensurate with the talent of the author of Moby-Dick” (Lebowitz 206).

Poet-critic Aaron Kramer, in his introductory essay to Melville’s Poetry: Toward the Enlarged Heart: A Thematic Study of Three Ignored Major Poems (1972), celebrates the poetry, applauding the rich annotations of other critics, but decrying their failure to evaluate the poems. Other book-length evaluative readings include: William Bysshe Stein, The Poetry of Melville’s Later Years (1970), William H. Shurr, The Mystery of Iniquity (1972), and Stan Goldman, Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in Clarel (1993). A Critical Guide to Herman Melville: Abstracts of Forty Years of Criticism (Bowen and Vanderbeets, 1971) provides seven abstracts of the poetry, accounting for five out of one hundred and two pages of abstracts; the bibliography lists eighteen entries for the poetry, one page out of the total twenty-four. Of the four books just mentioned and an array of articles of widely-varying insight, perhaps half a dozen offer close, informed, and helpful readings of the poetry.3 It may be that the enormous body of scholarship on the prose has not only dwarfed the possibility of examining the poetry closely and seriously, but has mitigated the spirit of critical examination of this “lesser” expression, maligned in its early reception.

The most common engagement with Melville’s poetry takes the form of sweeping statements not sufficiently grounded in a close examination of the poetry. Though often generous in their brief assessment, these statements are necessarily limited by the writers’ focus on the issues under discussion, to which the poetry remains incidental. To reiterate, in commentaries on writings of the nineteenth century, notably the Civil War and its spawned grief and greed, Melville is seen as “the poet of outrage of his century in America” (Rukeyser 86), or viewed as having progressed into silence, in one instance with only a terse comment about what one suspects are unread poems: “Nor is there any reason to believe that his poetry would have earned survival had it not been for interest in him as a novelist” (Lebowitz 206).

The significant factor in the limited record of scholarly comment on Melville’s poetry until the 1990s is that criticism of Melville has been governed by his prose fiction. Critics on Melville (1972) collects excerpts from roughly one hundred and twenty years of reception; it contains but one assessment of the poetry, an excerpt from Richard Harter Fogle’s “The Themes of Melville’s Later Poetry”:4

John Marr and Other Sailors, a small collection of sea-pieces, is more satisfactory than Battle-Pieces 1866 or Clarel, perhaps because it is less ambitious and briefer. In it a more relaxed Melville turns to his past, now remote and idealized by long assimilative reflection… Timoleon 1891, like John Marr and Other Poems [sic] was printed in a tiny edition of twenty-five copies. Its poetry, for the most part the product of Melville’s old age, is of even higher quality… The body of poems unpublished in Melville’s life-time lacks the coherence of his published volumes, for the most part, and these poems date from various, sometimes undetermined periods of his life from about 1859. The greater number of them presumably come from his old age…. With this uncertainty about dates it is impossible to trace any definite development of theme in Melville’s unpublished poems, but for the most part they fall into thematic groups… Perhaps the largest group among these unpublished pieces attacks the utilitarian spirit of the age from various points of view, nostalgic, idealistic, hedonist, charitable. (Rountree 118; 119; 120)

Fogle’s contribution to the volume demonstrates that criticism of the poetry was marginalized through most of the twentieth century, and thematic concerns extrapolated from sources other than the poems themselves have been applied to Melville’s poems. Individual poems were usually cited to substantiate a single concept or larger thematic concerns, rather than serving as point of departure for scrutiny of the text itself. Andrew Hook’s comment on this problem is to the point:

A recent collection entitled New Perspectives on Herman Melville contains no essay on Melville’s poetry; indeed the book’s index suggests that no contributor, in writing about Melville’s fiction, found it necessary to make any allusion whatsoever to the fact that Melville wrote poetry as well as novels and short stories. The reference is to the volume edited by Faith Pullin, University of Glasgow Press, 1978. What does this ignoring of Melville the poet imply? That it is impossible to offer a new perspective on Melville’s poetry? Given the ingenuity of contemporary critics this is hardly likely. Much more probable is the implication that there is no need for a new perspective on Melville’s poetry. The poetry, that is, is an irrelevance, a distraction, a minor afterthought. Melville’s stature and reputation as a major artist, it is implied, rests fairly and squarely on his achievement as a prose writer; it is the novels and stories that count—the poetry is… well, nowhere, not merely out of perspective, but out of sight. (Hook 176)

Hook’s admonition identifies a problem that was not easily corrected. In Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville, Michael Paul Rogin offers a stylistic précis of two of Melville’s volumes of poems:

Clarel and Battle-Pieces are equally distant both from the flowery tropes of mid-nineteenth-century American poetic convention and from the personal exuberance and anti-formalist stance of Walt Whitman. Melville saddled himself with a complex rhyme scheme in Clarel, forcing his material into a rigid, predetermined structure. Sometimes the effect is clumsy, sometimes explosive. The Battle-Pieces have a rougher texture than Clarel… Poetic excess is eliminated, poetic lines are short, and there is minimal descriptive detail. Little of the actual bloody carnage finds its way into these poems. Their images are physical, nonetheless, generating a tension between the formal poetry and the concrete, historical world of war. That tension gives the poems their power. Melville’s form armours the poet, protecting him as he enters the war, and it also embodies the experiences he has recovered from the battles. (Rogin 260)

Rogin’s case for the strength of Melville’s poems is based on their aesthetic elements, despite assailing aestheticist formalism. His primary concern in discussing the poetry, however, is with substantiating thematically his biographical and political reading of Melville’s relationship to family and state, and the dilemma that inheres in the transference and projection of clan membership to a national level.

A variety of articles also specifically addresses “Melville the Poet,” the title of a 1976 symposium issue of Essays in Arts and Sciences, edited by Douglas Robillard; they range from Nathalia Wright’s “The Poems in Melville’s Mardi,” to William Bysshe Stein’s “‘The New Ancient of Days’: The Poetics of Logocracy,” a study of Melville’s parodic dealing with “the mutual cannibalistic appetite of words.” This special issue of the journal remains a touchstone for the study of the poems. Wright’s descriptive article asserts, in its most evaluative remark, that “[t]he greatest difference between the Mardi