All Herman Melville's Poems Considered at Boston Review

Library of America has published an edition of Herman Melville's Complete Poems, which, in Gillian Osborne's words, "includes collections published during his lifetime and reviewed widely, such as Battle-Pieces (1866), completed in the aftermath of the Civil War. In addition, the book collects work largely unknown by—and unavailable to—general readers until now." Reading on from there: 

This latter category includes the epic poem Clarel (1876), notable both for being the longest American poem to date, and for having most of its first edition burned by the publisher to clear out warehouse space. Library of America is billing the Complete Poems as a resuscitation of one of the United States’ greatest nineteenth-century poets, establishing Melville within the company of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. But while the collection has the potential to change popular understanding of the kind of writer Melville was, the pleasures of reading Melville as a poet are ambiguous, as is the urge to classify him as great.

In a prose sketch, “House of the Tragic Poet,” written sometime during the last three decades of his life, Melville imagines a friendly editor’s advice to an aging poet seeking publication for a collection combining poetry and prose: “as regards your manuscript,” the editor confides, “the originality, let me frankly say, is mostly of the negative kind.” Melville wouldn’t have had to stretch far to anticipate such criticism. As a fiction writer, his career tanked after certain demonstrations of originality: in 1851 with the publication of Moby Dick—widely panned upon publication—and even more so the following year, when he published Pierre, an allegorical romance turned urban thriller with heavy doses of incest, gypsy guitars, and aesthetic theory, the combination of which the nineteenth-century reading public was decidedly underprepared to receive.

Read on at Boston Review.