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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Why Melville is not a great poet ( My feeling of this),
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This review is from: Battle Pieces: The Civil War Poems of Herman Melville (American Poetry) (Hardcover)
I think that one of the first questions which must be asked about the poetry of Melville, is why it is on the level of Melville's greatest prose, which is a most poetic prose at times. Why is it that Melville's real power is in those vast cathedral-tunes of sentences which sing together though they seem to shoot of in all directions, the prose of his great narratives?
It is almost as if the complexity of Melville's thought when confined to small lines , loses its power in feeling .And its rhythm too somehow goes off , and leaves us without the sense and power of the memorable. 'Great poetry' as I understand it is 'lines which resound in the mind and return to us again and again' My sense is that Melville's lines do not make it in this way. I of course may well be wrong, but this is my feeling. |
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Battle Pieces: The Civil War Poems of Herman Melville (American Poetry) by Lisa Lipkin (Hardcover - Oct. 2000)
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