Introduction: Reading and Teaching Clarel

Critical neglect of Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) constitutes the most perennial of tropes in discussions of Melville’s longest poem, even and especially as the poem gains more attention. By this point, we might draw back from describing Clarel as being neglected at all. It is available in two exemplary modern critical editions, Walter Bezanson’s 1960 Hendricks House edition and the 1991 Northwestern University Press/Newberry Library edition, which among its wealth of supporting material incorporates much of Bezanson’s scholarship. For use in the classroom, there is also an affordable Northwestern Newberry reader’s edition. Clarel has been a primary point of focus for no fewer than seven book-length studies: Joseph G. Knapp’s Tortured Synthesis (1971), Vincent Kenny’s Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Spiritual Autobiography (1974), Larry Edward Wegener’s A Concordance to Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1979), Stan Goldman’s Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in Clarel (1993), Laura López Peña’s Beyond the Walls: Being with Each Other in Herman Melville’s Clarel (2015), and William Potter’s Melville’s Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds (2004) are devoted to Clarel in their entirety, and Hilton Obenzinger’s American Palestine: Melville, Mark Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (1999) devotes roughly half of its 300-plus pages to the poem. Additionally, the MLA International Bibliography lists 158 hits in response to an open search for Clarel, including books that devote substantial, and sometimes multiple, chapters to the poem; journal articles; and book chapters in edited volumes. Scholars who appear on this list (in addition to those above) include Nina Baym, Dennis Berthold, Jonathan A. Cook, Shirley Dettlaff, Edgar Dryden, James Duban, Jonathan Gellman, Bruce A. Harvey, Michael Jonik, Wyn Kelley, Amy Kaplan, Alfred Kazin, Martin Kevorkian, Timothy Marr, Cody Marrs, Robert Milder, Peter Norberg, Samuel Otter, Ilana Pardes, Hershel Parker, Gordon Poole, Basem Ra’ad, Peter Riley, Malini Johar Schueller, Bryan C. Short, William Shurr, Martyn Smith, William Spengemann, Robert K. Wallace, Tim Wood, Brian Yothers, and Thomas Zlatic, among others. Two recent edited collections, Branka Arsić’s and K. L. Evans’s Melville’s Philosophies (2017) and Jonathan A. Cook’s and Brian Yothers’s Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion (2017), each devote multiple chapters to Melville’s Holy Land poem. If Clarel is not yet one of Melville’s greatest hits, it is at least far from invisible. The works cited list for this essay can serve as a select bibliography of the important work already devoted to Clarel.

Even so, Clarel still bears the marks of a neglected text, especially because it still has not become a widely taught text. It remains infrequently taught at the graduate level and rare at the undergraduate level. In part, this state of affairs derives from the challenges we all face in teaching narrative poetry: if we excerpt Clarel, our students miss the opportunity to experience the poem as narrative, and if we do not excerpt it, we are left with a choice between omitting it from the syllabus altogether or teaching a five-hundred page poem—no easy dilemma to resolve.

How might we make a case for teaching Clarel? We might start by noting its substantial place in Melville’s career. Melville is the author of American literature’s most frequently taught long work of prose fiction, Moby-Dick, and two of its most frequently taught works of shorter prose fiction, Billy Budd and “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” with “Benito Cereno” rapidly gaining ground. And yet Melville spent more time working on Clarel than he did on the composition of any of these works; aside from Moby-Dick itself, nothing in Melville’s canon matches Clarel’s extraordinarily ambitious scope. Protracted and difficult, Clarel may not be ideal material for American literature surveys and introduction to poetry classes, but it amply rewards investigation as part of an author course on Melville or as part of a more advanced course in American poetry, travel writing, literature and religion, and the literature of...