Customer Reviews

Herman Melville: Selected Poems

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Herman Melville never wanted to be remembered as the "a man who lived among the cannibals," but perhaps he would have been even more chagrined had he only known that one day he would be immortalized in the crossword puzzle genre for down or across hackneyed answers such as Typee, Omoo, Abab and Pequot. Fortunately for Melville a recent resurgence in the interest of his work has re-energized an old audience and has created a new, more enthusiastic following. His work is now a redemptive force in the literary world, especially for a brilliant man who was considered, for the most part, to be an utter failure in his day.

A newly issued, one-volume collection of his collected prose and poetry, HERMAN MELVILLE Selected Poems, will assist the reader in further understanding this brilliant, yet complicated and tortured soul.

Perhaps discouraged by seemingly lack of interest in his previous works he increasingly turned to writing prose poetry in later life almost to exclusion of other forms of writing. It is not hard to decipher from reading his prose that he poured his intellect and life blood into its creation. A wide swath of his poetry is included in this book from his observations of the Civil War to assorted musings. His gifts are most evident in poems such as Donelson (the capture of Ft. Donelson on February 16, 1862). This tightly knit, complicated piece captures glimpses of the battle from several points of view. Sections in this work can be quite vivid:

Great suffering through the night-/A stinging one. Our heedless boys/Were nipped like blossoms. Some/dozen Hapless wounded were frozen./During day being struck down out of sight,/And help-cries drowned in roaring noise,/They were left just where the skirmish shifted-/Left in dense underbrush snow-drifted./Some,
seeking to crawl in crippled plight,/So stiffened-perished.

Robert Faggen's learned introduction, the author's occasional supplementary material and notes nicely round out and complete this book.

I was most taken by Melville's Civil War prose, but I felt that very little if any of this work was particularly memorable as in the case of Browning or Yeats - snippets of their work often come to mind. I would agree that his prose is brilliant, but has not and will not stand the test of time as his novels Moby Dick, Billy Budd, Typee and his other works have. Civil war buffs or readers wanting to round out or complete their Melville collections will be pleased to have this book.

Deb Fowler - Roundtable Reviews