Melville's Marginalia: Milton's Poems

Melville’s Hand S T U D I E S O F M A N U S C R I P T A N D I N T E R P R E T A T I O N Melville’s Marginalia: Milton’s Poems DOUGLAS ROBILLARD New Orleans n a letter of February 24, 1849 to Evert Duyckinck, Melvillespoke of reading Shakespeare’sworks in “an edition in glorious great type, every letter Iwhereof is a soldier.” This was the edition that Melville had purchased, in seven volumes, published in 1837 in Boston by the firm of Hilliard, Gray and Company. The set became a close companion for Melville, liberally marked and annotated. During the same year he also acquired a two-volume set of The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited by John Mitford and published by the same Boston firm in 1836. These volumes, too, he inscribed extensively with his marginalia, by marking passages that were meaningful for him in his work as an author and by recording his reactions in comments written in the margins of the pages. This set, like the Shakespeare, was in “gloriousgreat type” and included numerous footnotescallingattention to other specimensof Milton scholarship.It often associated Miltonic passages with the works of other writers, among them Virgil, Horace, Shakespeare,and du Bartas. Melville followed suit by offering his own associations,writing the names of other writers at appropriateplaces:Dante, Tasso, Virgil, Shakespeare,and others. For instance,the phrase “dreadfulinterval” in Book VI of Parudise Lost reminded him of Thomas Campbell’s phrase, “the deadly space between,” and he made the connection between Milton’s heavenly battle and Campbell’s earthly struggle between warships. For Melville, the volumes of Milton, like those of Shakespeare, were storehouses of usable words, phrases, lines,and passages to be absorbedand to find their way into his own fiction and poetry,in quotations, paraphrases, and allusions. The importance of Milton’spoetry to Melville’swritings has long been recognized. Henry E Pommer’s Milton and Melville published in 1950 and reprinted in 1970, pointed out allusions and quotations. Mansfield and Vincent’s notes to the Hendricks House edition of Moby-Dick (1952) developed the idea of the Miltonic Satan’srelationship to Ahab. A number of articles pointed out borrowings and echoes in Melville’swork taken from the writings of the English poet. However, since Melville’s copy of Milton’spoems was not available for study when these were written, it was not possible to know exactly the extent of Melville’smarkings and marginal annotations. The twovolume set of Milton was acquired as part of Princeton University’s rare book 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 ES T U D I E S 1 1 3 D O U G L A S R O B I L L A R D collection, and even a cursory inspection makes it clear that Melville read his Milton assiduously and marked passages and occasionally expressed his own opinions about what Milton was saying. Although Pommer worked without having access to the volumes Melville owned, he speculated upon which edition Melville might have used.’ He listed, among others, the 1836 edition from Hilliard, Gray and Company, linking it (“aninteresting though weak link,” he says) by the printer’smark of the dolphin and anchor. He then cites Melville’sremark in Moby-Dick, Chapter 55, about “the book-binder’s whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor-as stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both old and new.” Two more recent articles draw upon the Milton volumes for analysis of Melville’s writings. Robin Grey’s “Surmising the Infidel: Interpreting Melville’s Annotations on Milton’sPoetry” uses both markings and Melville’sannotations to “infer a distinct, composite interpretation of Milton’s poetic and theological agendas” and to point out how “Melvillewas a highly engaged and frequently ingenious reader of Milton’spoetry.”*Daniel Goske’s“Melville’sMilton” in the Princeton University Library Chronicle suggests that Melville studied Milton’s poetry “at several stages of his writing...