Melville

by Parker, Hershel

• ISBN13: 9780810124646
• ISBN10: 0810124645
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-11
• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr

Summary

"Who would have looked for philosophy in whales, or for poetry in blubber?" the LondonJohn Bullremarked in October of 1851. And yet, the reviewer went on, "few books which professedly deal in metaphysics, or claim the parentage of the muses, contain as much true philosophy and as much genuine poetry as the tale of thePequod's whaling expedition." A decade and a half before surprising the world with a book of Civil war poetry, Melville was already confident of what was "poetic" in his prose. As Hershel Parker demonstrates in this book, Melville was steeped in poetry long before he called himself a poet. Here Parker, the dean of Melville studies, gives a compelling, in-depth account of how one of America's greatest writers grew into the vocation of a poet. His work corrects two of the most pernicious misconceptions about Melville perpetuated by earlier critics: that he repudiated fiction writing afterPierre, and that he hadn't begun writing poetry (let alone had a book of poems ready for publication) as early as 1860. In clearing up these misapprehensions, Parker gives a thorough and thoroughly involving account of Melville's development as a poet. Parker demonstrates for the first time just how crucial poetry was to Melville from childhood to old age, especially its re-emergence in his life after 1849. Drawing on Melville's shrewd annotations of great British poets and on his probing, skeptical engagement with commentaries on poetry (particularly by the great Scots reviewers), Parker paints a richly textured portrait of a hitherto unseen side of Herman Melville.

Author Biography

Hershel Parker, H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware, is the associate general editor of the Northwestern-Newberry The Writings of Herman Melville. His publications include Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons, Reading "Billy Budd”, and the 1995 edition of Melville's Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. He is also the author of the two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851 (1996) and Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851-1891 (2002), the first a Pulitzer finalist and each the winner of the highest award from the Association of American Publishers' Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Melville's Lost Books and the Trajectory of His Career as Poet	p. 3
A Poet in Prose: How Critics Prepared Neville to Think of Himself as a Poet	p. 11
Melville as Hearer and Reciter of Poetry	p. 23
The Omnipresence of Poetry, 1820s-1848	p. 31
The Renewed Power of Poetry in Melville's Life, 1849-1856	p. 67
The Status of Poetry and the Temptation of Flunkeyism	p. 101
A Nonpartisan Becoming a Poet During the Risorgimento	p. 111
Melville's Progress as Poet, 1857(?) to May 1860	p. 125
Possible Contents of Poems (1860)	p. 135
On the Meteor: Melville When He Thought He Was a Published Poet	p. 145
His Verse Still Unpublished, Melville Defines Himself as Poet, 1861-1862	p. 153
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War: Melville's Second Volume of Poems	p. 189
Epilogue	p. 205
Notes	p. 207
Works Cited	p. 217
Index	p. 225
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