Melville the Poet: Response to William Spengemann

William Spengemann (in his essay appearing in the Winter 1999 American Literary History) is right that Herman Melville's poems have mostly languished since they were originally published between 1866 and 1891. But his argument that they are languishing now and will continue to do so if scholars persist on their present misguided path is based on what I will argue to be a misinterpretation of the current reception scenario. I contend that a sea change in the reception of the poems is incipient. In fact, I believe that a revival of Melville's poetry will begin within the next 10 years.

Let me start with a quick summary of Spengemann's argument. He suggests four primary reasons for the long-standing neglect of the poems. First, constructions of Melville as essentially a writer of fiction have damaged reception of the poetry. If we begin to think of Melville as a lifelong poet and read his poems in that light, many assumptions about them will change.

Second, we do not think of Melville as a poet in part because of the nature of the poetry. Its resistance is construed by many as "badness," a judgment Spengemann rightly challenges. It does not resemble either of "the two main schools of twentieth-century poetry in English"--"the formally experimental and the stylistically colloquial"--and thus remains, as he nicely puts it, "neither at home in [Melville's] own century nor quite welcome in ours" (604). ¹

Third, Spengemann correctly notes that the "uncertain standing" of the poetry is due "[a]bove all" to "its continuing unavailability in a reliable and affordable, complete edition" (604). Spengemann himself relied, as many scholars still do, on the 1947 Hendricks House edition, Collected Poems of Herman Melville, a legendary botch edited by Howard P. Vincent. More reliable editions are available in the form of dissertations and first editions or their facsimiles, which puts them out of the hands of most readers. ² (And Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land [1876] was not published anonymously, as Spengemann claims [573]. ³ )

Spengemann's fourth point is more questionable. "Melvilleans are all literary nationalists" (571), he claims, and since "literary Americanness" is found readily in Melville's fiction but not in his poetry, the former has been more ideologically congenial than the latter to Melville scholarship. Some Melvilleans surely have been literary nationalists, especially in the early decades of the Melville Revival when "American literature" scholarship was in its infancy and largely justified itself as an exercise in nationalist virtue. ⁴ But Melville scholarship has produced many kinds of work, even in the early years, that do not conform to Spengemann's nationalist narrative. He is similarly inaccurate about the history of Melville scholarship when he reports that "[w]henever Melville's decision to write only verse has been viewed at all charitably, it has been explained as a withdrawal, whether forced or voluntary, from the public sphere into his own private world" (582). Stanton Garner's "charitable" 1993 biography, The Civil War World of Herman Melville, would be one prominent counterexample, insofar as Garner portrays Melville as spiritually agonized by a public crisis--the war--that ultimately called him to become its poet.

I call attention to Spengemann's generalizations because they speak to the misleading rhetorical effect of his essay on the whole. Because he describes the master narrative in the history of criticism on the poetry, which portrays it as unfortunate, bad, weak, and so on, and not the counternarratives that are also part of that history, which see it as compelling, deep, difficult, and worthy of study, his own argument about Melville's poetic virtues appears more unique than it is. I will cite just a few examples from the history of the criticism: "Melville's poems . . . remain still . . . largely unread and very little discussed, remarkable as some of their qualities are" (Arvin 1034 [1949]); "Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville seem to me...