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Selected Poems Of Herman Melville: A Reader's Edition (Nonpareil Book)

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After the publication of The Confidence Man in 1857, Melville gave up. He had written ten books in eleven years, of such daring originality that they would scarcely be appreciated until a century later. He was ill and depressed, so he did what any genius of language might; he took to writing poetry. It's often supposed that he abandoned writing thoroughly until that last brilliant eruption, Billy Budd. In fact, he wrote a lot of poetry, including an epic of two volumes, Clarel, a tale of a young man's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, wherein he traverses desert wastes of doubt and despair.

The curious thing is that Melville, the innovative and luxurious stylist of prose, wrote poetry of disappointing conventionality. Not one of his poems would stand out for excellence in an anthology of selections from college magazines. Critics have tried again and again to make a case for Melville's poetry, but they are inevitably thwarted by the inert stodginess of his stanzas. Ironically, the best poetic language is to be found in Clarel, which has to be the least read work by any major American writer.

Why read Melville's poems at all, then? The most worthwhile are probably his Civil War poems, published in a collection called "Battle Pieces," which will interest historians, for their revelation of the semiotics of the war, more than poetry lovers. Melville the poet was a tortured cultural conservative, perhaps in reaction to his own unbottoned radicalism as a novelist. It makes one wonder how much the great story of Bartleby the Scrivener was a prophetic self-portrait.