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ОглавлениеChapter 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 poems and the later ones is that while the first are spirited and exclamatory, the last tend to be meditative and cryptic” (Robillard 96). With regard to burial at sea, a significant subject in Melville’s prose and poetry, Wright ventures, “it would seem that this ritual was one of the images that most often haunted his imagination” (Robillard 99).
Bryan C. Short appraises the poems at the outset in his essay, “‘The Redness of the Rose’: The Mardi Poems and Melville’s Artistic Compromise”:
Whereas the initial poems founder in sentimentalism, technical excesses, and effects parodic of Poe, as Yoomy solidifies into a prototype of Ishmael they achieve a genuine depth and sophistication… An examination of the Mardi poems reveals how their combination of aestheticism, sincerity, and symbolic weight generate the compromise between prophetic and comforting art at the heart of the novel. (Robillard 101)
Regarding the poetry of burial at sea, Short astutely notes:
The burial song embodies one of Melville’s great themes, that the transcendental searcher can claim to be a law unto himself only by ignoring the sincere wisdom imbedded in our shared aesthetic and emotional lives, later associated with Father Mapple’s sermon and the gentle landward influences of Starbuck. The aptly incantatory style of the song demonstrates the ability of poetic technique to bring serious concepts to public attention; popularity need not betoken shallowness. (Robillard 104)
His conclusion recognizes Melville’s poetics as a substitute for philosophy:
When Melville turns seriously to verse, he returns to the compromise and freedom of Mardi, and he faces the terrors of subjectivity in a series of works whose universality, sophistication, and vigor, and whose underlying poetics, justify our calling Melville America’s greatest Victorian poet. (Robillard 111)
For Short, sympathetic reader, the poems remain an ancillary component of the larger primary corpus, his prose.
A number of contributors to the same symposium do approach the poetry in its own right. Bertrand Mathieu’s “‘Plain Mechanic Power’: Melville’s Earliest Poems, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War” opens with examples of Miltonic echoes in Melville’s poems, a labor Henry Pommer had undertaken and expanded into a book-length study, Milton and Melville (1950). With reference to Paradise Lost, “wherein Milton characterizes rhyme as ‘no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good verse… but the Invention of a barbarous Age,’” Mathieu comments, “Melville was clearly serving a serious apprenticeship” (Robillard 114). He acknowledges writers appreciative of Melville’s Civil War poetry in a discussion of rhyme and metrical effects of poems from Battle-Pieces that showcase Melville’s poetic skill. He adds,
[w]hat some have called “inept” in Melville’s earliest poems was, at its best, a conscious effort to win through to a poetic style both hard-edged and jolting enough to capture the ‘plain mechanic power’ of a kind of war (and a kind of poem) with which we are all, by now much better acquainted. (Robillard 128)
In “Melville’s Poetic Strategy in Clarel: The Satellite Poems,” William H. Wasilewski considers the neglected poems within Clarel to convey “psychological and spiritual intimations” that underscore Clarel’s growth (Robillard 149). Clarel’s reading of the poem “Judea,” for example, reveals the universality of a problem Clarel believes to be uniquely his.
“On Translating Clarel” echoes Melville’s close reading and extensive marking of Matthew Arnold’s “On Translating Homer.” Agnes Dicken Cannon notes:
His markings show that he was still mulling over in his mind possible approaches to the work he was about to begin and that he was obviously undecided as to a meter for Clarel. The manner in which he wishes to treat his material seems to have been fairly well determined but the metrical form and the stylistic means of achieving the desired total effect were not yet clear to him. (Robillard 160)
Cannon scrutinizes Melville’s markings in Arnold’s essay to demonstrate Melville’s desire for “a simpler grand style, more closely approximating his, and Arnold’s, conception of Homer,” as distinguished from Milton’s “severe grand style.” Cannon views those markings as “valuable insights into Melville’s thoughts upon style and meter” (Robillard 161).
“‘I Laud the Inhuman Sea’: Melville as Poet in the 1880s,” by Douglas Robillard, contextualizes Melville’s poetry with reference to John Marr and Other Sailors. Robillard views Melville’s volume of sea poems as a reflection on the predicament of the artist, as well as on Melville’s deep love for the sea, linking specific poems with events in Melville’s life in the 1880s. Importantly, he considers the social climate in which Melville chose to publish editions of only twenty-five copies each of John Marr and Timoleon Etc. and decided to leave other poems unpublished. He refers to Melville’s “language and imagery that seems calculated to offend the audience of the time… To write as one wished,” Robillard notes, “was one thing; to place it before a public that would probably respond with hostility was an entirely different matter” (Robillard 203-204).
In “Melville’s Late Poetry and Billy Budd: From Nostalgia to Transcendence” symposium contributor Robert Milder focuses on the thematic and biographical while remaining committed to the integrity of the poetry itself. He notes, “John Marr and Timoleon show Melville still quarreling with Providence and society, uncertain of the value of his long dedication to art, and divided between a bleak awareness of human tragedy and a fond retrospection” (494). Milder finds Billy Budd’s origins “in the nostalgia and despair of John Marr,” an uncommon reversal by which, in Milder’s estimation, the poetry generates the prose.
A number of the Symposium critics found a broad and generous entrée to Melville’s poetry in Walter Bezanson’s introduction to his edition of Clarel. There he offers a disarming appraisal:
We have not lived long enough with the idea that he was a poet at all to decide justly how good a poet he was. Fearing that claims for his verse would seem a generous illusion stemming from his prose, we may have sold the poetry short. Or we may have been unwittingly baffled by finding in the poetry many of the conceptual values of the novels expressed without that rich copiousness which is the hallmark of his best known prose. Once we face up to the idea that Melville’s poetry is not an extension of the lyric vein of his famous novels but is a wholly new mode of contracted discourse we will be more ready to judge the poetry. (Bezanson x)
He then provides a reasoned description of the poet and his poetry:
[E]ssentially he was drawn to a non-lyrical, even harsh, prosodic line. Center for him as poet was usually the weight and texture of a “situation.” He was so convinced of the complexity of the human condition that he preferred to make his poems situational constructions, as if to say that personality and circumstance are always shaping belief, meaning, and sensibility. If this narrative impulse links him with Browning and Meredith, among his English contemporaries, his characteristic idiom binds him also to Emerson and Dickinson. Though Melville is too intellectual a poet ever to be popular, he is surely among any cluster of the halfdozen best poets of nineteenth-century America. (Bezanson x-xi)
This recognition of the complexity and sensitivity of Melville’s compositional practice diagnoses Melville’s critical reception as poet: A reading public acquainted with Melville’s adventure novels, particularly Typee, Omoo and Mardi, found the poems abstruse and disappointing, as they had found Moby-Dick, a work that proved illegible to the readers who anticipated yet another South Seas adventure tale. Such a response reminds us of Emerson’s dictum, cited as this chapter’s epigraph: “This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes.” Melville as poet had indeed become someone other than the familiar storyteller the public had come to expect.
Melville, from the beginning, has been charged with writing “a frankly high-brow” kind of poetry, and a nostalgic poetry, of being a humanist more than a naturalist, and of creating elemental naturalistic imagery in Battle-Pieces. He is credited with imagery of nautical disaster in John Marr and Other Sailors, of sightseeing in Timoleon Etc., and with “the homely imagery of countrified retirement and quiet domestic simplicity” (Arvin 1043) in the manuscript poems. But as I have noted, this history of commentary about the poems offers little sustained discussion of the poems.5 John Bryant observes in this regard, that
Melville’s poetry remains the least studied of his works. Yet it contains energies and innovations, passages of remarkable power and insight as well as technical virtuosity and experimental daring, which by themselves might have made him one of the notable American writers. If he had written no prose at all, we would still have a poet in the American pantheon named Herman Melville. As it is, little is known of this aspect of his work… It may be that we still need a larger theory of Melville the Writer that would account for the prose and poetry together before this part of his work can be assessed adequately. In view of this situation there can hardly be a tradition of Melville criticism in this area. (351)
Following this leading observation, I propose a modified version of a rhetorical figure that could well serve the purpose of Bryant’s suggestion. Perhaps we can begin to approach the poetry, aside from the prose and yet mindful of Melville as writer of prose fiction and non-fiction, through the trope of tmesis. Tmesis, literally “a cutting” in Greek, is an interjection of a word or phrase at the lexical level, a self-interruption that splits an expression. In the case of Melville, I propose we project this rhetorical strategy to the level of his literary corpus. Considered in this framework, Melville’s poetic production functions as a tmesis in the continuity of his literary career. His poetry, then, serves as occasion of rending and as healing of division, as cleaving, ambivalent in its schismatic parting and faithful adherence to a poetic corpus and national body politic, as I shall explain further shortly.
This self-interruption shares the attributes of flight. In John Marr, Timoleon Etc., Clarel, Battle-Pieces, and the uncollected or unpublished poems, Melville retraces his geographical, political, historical, philosophical and literary itineraries. These re-tracings and their intersections figure a chiasmus, a trope of repetition and reversed order. These productive crossings open up new territory. That frontier elicits a number of critical insights in which Melville occupies a pivotal position. Here is a resonant convergence of voices—from D.H. Lawrence to Gilles Deleuze—invoking the centrality of Melville in this territorial expanse:
[t]o leave, to escape, is to trace a line. The highest aim of literature, according to [D.H.] Lawrence, is “to leave, to leave, to escape… to cross the horizon, enter into another… It is thus that Melville finds himself in the middle of the Pacific. He has really crossed the line of horizon.” The line of flight is a deterritorialization… to flee is not to renounce action: nothing is more active than a flight. It is the opposite of the imaginary. It is also to put to flight—not necessarily others, but to put something to flight, to put a system to flight as one bursts a tube. (Deleuze and Parnet 36-37)
On one hand, the “something” that Melville puts to flight is the writing of prose for a largely unreceptive public, and an often critically hostile reception. On the other hand, he puts to flight, that is, he launches a poetic endeavor, a work different from his previous craft, that transcends one corpus by taking on another body. Deterritorialization, or writing’s territorial displacement, like Melville’s far-flung itinerary, is the overcoming of corporate (national, personal, and authorial) limits; the delimited self seeks less limited, indeed limitless, self-articulation.
The critical approaches to Melville’s poetry, as we have seen, array themselves as biographical studies, moral-aesthetic cultural readings, or assumptions about a partially examined subject. Thematic criticism is governed largely by readings of Melville’s prose fiction and its thematic structure, or results from treating his poetry as an extension of his fiction. Melville’s cultural horizons transcend and violate such rubrics through which, for the most part, he has been read.
Throughout the critical treatment surveyed here, the reader will have recognized the leit-motif of neglect, ambivalence, and incommensurate special pleading, an underscoring of the lack of institutional legitimation and social authorization. It may be considered a specious argument to rail against a particular exclusion from the canon of an author already canonized, albeit in only one genre. This study, however, identifies a larger kind of exclusion in Melville’s case. White male with impeccable ancestral credentials, Melville was, nonetheless, the son of a bankrupt father. His class status was compromised by ensuing hard times; he did not attend college, and he shipped as a sailor. He opposed religious proselytizing as unchristian in its methods and motives, and was horrified by military hierarchies that meted out unjust and corporal punishment to subordinates. He recoiled from the reality of racism, and was anti-war in his sentiments and moral convictions. These ethical stands were at least as unpopular in the United States of the mid-nineteenth century as they are in our own time. Life-oriented responses to repressive and suppressive action are registered in Melville’s writing, as much in his poetry as in his prose. Far from being a prosthesis for the prose writing from which Melville severed himself for nearly thirty years, the poetry is an integral part of the literary corpus exhumed some thirty years after his death in 1891.6
Ever mindful of his status as a forgotten author, Melville pursued both the immediate and distant past, recollecting his writing life at the center of a reading culture, and the life he had lived that gave rise to those writings. His fame had been intense and brief. As a result, Melville had forebodings about the reception of his poetry. In May 1862, he wrote to his brother Thomas about his early poems:
You will be pleased to learn that I have disposed of a lot of it at a great bargain. In fact, a trunk-maker took the whole stock off my hands at ten cents the pound. So, when you buy a new trunk again, just peep at the lining & perhaps you may be rewarded by some glorious stanza staring you in the face and claiming admiration. If you were not such a devil of a ways off, I would send you a trunk, by way of presentation copy. (C 377)
This sardonic appraisal of his own poems proved prophetic. Melville’s poetry has been considered little more than the excess paper of his professional life, the lining of the cumbersome trunk in which was packed the stuff of his career. Biographers and critics have kept immaculate account of the contents of this metaphorical trunk––Melville’s activity and thought throughout his life. The dating and ordering of his poetic corpus and his possible reasons for including various poems in particular groupings have also been considered carefully and at length.
The primary interest of the present study is not in reiterating chronology or closely correlating Melville’s whereabouts and their influence on his poetic production. I have chosen instead to engage Melville’s oppositional poetics, the contrariety of his approach to writing poetry distinct from the orthodox expectations for poetry in the U.S. of the late-nineteenth century. Melville’s rejection by a readership that demanded a countenanced rhyme and meter, predictable form, imagery and metaphor, ensured his continued antithetical response to the condition of the country as well as to expectations for poetic discourse.
Melville’s dispossession by the reading public, his long travels abroad and civil war all precipitated his engagement with themes of separation and dissociation. These themes translate symptomatically into a number of technical poetic procedures that are characteristic of division and reintegration. In particular, three recurring tropes become salient: tmesis, chiasmus, and catachresis. To reiterate, tmesis, figures a self-interruption, a splitting of ideas or thoughts, and we see this manifested in the poems that are written as digression and as confluence, as well as in those poems that foreground the self-interruption of the nation in the form of civil war. Chiasmus, a trope of reversal, signifies intersection, a point of balance, or, in Melville’s specific use of this rhetorical arrangement, a paradox that checks progress toward a resolution of contraries. In Melville’s poetry this doubling back of a trajectory thwarts expectations as it dislocates, and thereby frustrates conventional associations and definitions. Catachresis, as we shall see shortly, is also a trope of displacement that disrupts significance and unsettles coherence. In its disconcertive function it mirrors the poet’s use of tmesis.
I examine these rhetorical figures as they apply to individual poems and as they manifest themselves in pairings of poems. For example, “Billy in the Darbies” and “Crossing the Tropics,” which I discuss in separate chapters, are both addressed in terms of reversal and dislocation, as thematically chiastic in their temporal-spatial arrangements, and oppositional in their subversion of conjunctions. Catachresis, central to the discussion of war in chapter three, serves as the dominant trope integral to poems of war’s dissonant, cataclysmic disruptions. Tmesis, a trope of self-interruption or division, figures both in my discussion of the war poems, and my reading of “After the Pleasure Party” in chapter five.
This study weaves these technical protocols through certain topical and thematic issues recurrent in Melville. It examines the poet’s attempts to come to terms with the unreconciled national agon through the oppositional mode of Battle-Pieces (chapter three), a volume that sees the victims of war as pieces of the battle, fragments and remnants of the cataclysm. Melville’s reading of the official reports and anecdotes of war in The Rebellion Record demonstrate his sensitivity to distortions of language and the lacunae, the rending silence and blindness that finally characterize reports on all wars. In his first published volume, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, Melville inscribed an alternative reading that subverted war’s aggrandizing praise and honor, and emphasized the hoax and ironies of war.
Distant from the battle-ground, the poems in John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces (1888) commemorate the dead and nearly-forgotten. I take mimesis in this context (chapter four) as Melville’s means of reconciling discrete elements at the heart of his representation of natural rhythm. He re-presents cosmic order and its complement, chaos, through prosimetric rhythm and language, the interlacing of prose and poetry. Melville discerns a comprehensive model of displacement and loneness that he mimes through poetic reincorporation of a disembodied past as a dialogue with memory. He invokes remembered shipmates, but his method of transferring remembered comrades to the writing present forecloses on a recall of definitive, categorical memory that would conclude the act of poetic recollection. We shall see how this creates the appearance of a conclusion, an insinuation that we are arriving at a decisive verse.
Isolation, essential to creative endeavor, is central to my discussion, in chapter five, of Melville’s last published volume, Timoleon Etc. (1891). In his compelled necessity to comprehend the nature of solitude, he turns to biblical and classical motifs. Jacob’s wrestling with the Angel and those myths and figures at the heart of classical tragedy occupy the ground on which Melville chooses to encounter a portion of the historical past as it affects the poetic process and the predicament of the writer in his own cultural context, a view marked by an absence of absolutes. It is in Timoleon Etc. that Melville again recognizes the nature of belatedness of which he had written forty-two years earlier: “The truth is that we are all sons, grandsons, or nephews, or great nephews of those who go before us. No one is his own sire” (C 121). His encounter with the ancient serves Melville as means to understanding who his grandsires might have been, and how they wrestled with what they were to become.
