"Mute Marbles": Roman Aesthetics in the Poetry

Abstracts MLA 2009—Philadelphia Herman Melville: A Writer and His Books CHAIR: PETER NORBERG, SAINT JOSEPH’S UNIVERSITY From left to right: Ida Rothschild, Brian Yothers, Shelly Jarenski, Dennis Berthold, Peter Norberg. Photo courtesy of Wyn Kelley. I n 1868, as he began to read again the major poets of the British romantic tradition, Melville acquired a copy of Lady Jane Shelley’s Shelley Memorials (Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1859). Among the numerous passages he marked in this book is a description of reading in a letter from William Godwin to Percy Shelley that bears directly on Melville’s own habits of reading and writing. Godwin wrote: “A true student is a man seated in his chair, and surrounded with a sort of intrenchment and breastwork of books. It is for C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 111 E X T R A C T S the boarding school misses to read one book at a time. Particularly when I am sifting out facts, either of science or history, I must place myself in the situation of a man making a book, rather than reading books. [ . . . ] True reading is investigation—not a passive reception of what our author gives us, but an active inquiry, appreciation, and digestion of his subject” (56). Melville’s attention was drawn to this passage less for its masculine bravado than for its careful correlation of reading and writing as inter-related, if not equivalent, activities. The books that he read and reread were integral to his creative output. He found in them inspiration, provocation, and oftentimes confirmation of his aesthetic ambitions and ideals. This panel examines how Melville’s reading can deepen our understanding of his writings and his aesthetic, political, and theological concerns as an author. Dennis Berthold demonstrates how Melville’s reading in art criticism influenced his conception of poetic form. Shelly Jarenski examines how nineteenth-century visual culture informed Melville’s experimental narrative aesthetics in Pierre, or The Ambiguities . Ida Rothschild shows how Melville’s appropriation of Shakespearean discourse in Moby-Dick reflects the use of allusions to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth by politicians and journalists in the late 1840s and early 1850s. And Brian Yothers explores how Melville’s skeptical theology was informed by his reading of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici. Together, these presentations exhibit how, from his major novels to his late poetry, Herman Melville’s creative output was intimately related to the creative input he received from his sustained reading in literature, philosophy, aesthetics, and the politics of his day. “Mute Marbles”: Roman Aesthetics in the Poetry Dennis Berthold Texas A&M University F or reasons unknown, Robert Macpherson sent an inscribed copy of Vatican Sculptures to Melville in 1866, providing him with a little volume of 136 line drawings of statues from the Vatican Museum, which Melville visited in 1857 and described in his lecture, “Statues in Rome” (185758 ). This book repeatedly stimulated Melville’s well-known visual imagination during the years when he was most absorbed with poetry and, combined with his prior knowledge of Roman art and politics, it offered him a primer on “Roman aesthetics,” a stoic fusion of word and image into obstinate, defiant form that runs through his later poetry. This aesthetic transcends time, history, and ideological contradictions through force, grandeur, bulk, and strength, the outcome of wrestling with the “Angel, Art” that most critics see as central to 112 L E V I A T H A N A B S T R A C T S Melville’s poetry. It stresses the sublime rather than the beautiful, and accounts for much of the rugged versification and jarring shifts of tone that characterizes his poetics. Macpherson’s influence is most evident in “After the Pleasure Party,” in which a woman astronomer named Urania finds strength for her decision to pursue knowledge rather than love when she views a statue of Pallas Athena, a “helmeted woman” who combines physical with...