Melville as Poet: The Art of “Pulsed Life” ed. by Sanford E. Marovitz (review)

The recovery of Melville’s poetry began in earnest in 1924 with Poems, volume 16 in Raymond Weaver’s herculean Standard Edition. As with Billy Budd, Weaver found himself struggling with works surviving only in manuscript but persevered to complete, within three decades or so of the author’s death, a virtually complete edition of the author’s poetry and prose. True, some of the poems had been buried for half a century, and others had never seen the light of day, but the poems published in the last years of Melville’s life had barely had time to tarnish before they were enshrined in a collected edition. Along with Weaver’s two-volume edition of Clarel, also published in 1924, Poems gave Melville’s poetry a fair start to be revived right alongside Moby-Dick.

That, of course, did not happen, as the poems were swiftly reburied. From time to time different resurrection-men scuffed among the bones, but after each disinterment the remains were carefully replaced by an ungrateful posterity. In 1947, Howard Vincent attempted another full collection of Melville’s verse, this time for Packard’s Hendricks House edition. Expanding a little (but not much) on Weaver, Vincent improved some misreadings and introduced others in an effort largely inspired, I believe, by the editor’s love and appreciation of the ekphrastic element in Melville’s metrical art. Other guardians—it would be conventional to call them torchbearers by the late fifties—kept the remains in view. Walter Bezanson published his edition of Clarel with Hendricks House in 1960, the greatest monument to Melville’s poetry by any scholar or critic before or since. Hennig Cohen published his annotated edition of Battle-Pieces in the Civil-War centennial year of 1963 and Selected Poems of Herman Melville in 1964; Robert Penn Warren published a volume with the same title in 1967. While each of these works was essential, none was seminal, and throughout the fifties and sixties the grass grew very green over the grave of Melville’s poems.

Then, in the early 1970s, a remarkable conjunction occurred in the world of Melville criticism. In 1970, William Bysshe Stein published his full-length monograph The Poetry of Melville’s Late Years. Two years later, William H. Shurr published The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857–1891, and poet Aaron Kramer published Melville’s Poetry: Toward the Enlarged Heart. Yet the seeming resurrection of Melville’s poetry was still not to be.

It would be instructive to gauge the advance of the study of Melville’s poetry through the example of one of these works, and since Shurr’s is perhaps the most often cited, his book will be my benchmark. Shurr’s bibliography—which, while intending to include “everything of any significance,” is appallingly short on titles devoted to the poetry alone—sets forth important assumptions and assertions which, far from becoming seminal, were almost immediately ignored or forgotten. First, Shurr knew that a just assessment of Melville’s poetry had to run independently of Melville’s achievement as a writer of fiction. For Shurr this principle did not mean, of course, that one should ignore carryovers in theme or imagery, but that the study of poetry had to be undertaken in its own right. Shurr was impatient with limited assessments of Melville’s poetry as unreadable or amateurish. Shurr, as his title asserted, rightly considered Melville’s poetic career to have begun immediately after his final experiment in pure prose, The Confidence-Man. And Shurr made this assertion not on the basis of inference, but from solid biographical evidence, including a discussion of Poems (1860). Finally, Shurr saw Billy Budd not as the last gasp of a prose writer but as the logical outgrowth of the poet’s mind. By 1972, in short, there existed a mature criticism of Melville’s poetry based on solid scholarship.

So what happened? Why, in 2005, was...