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Herman Melville (1819–1891)
- University of Massachusetts Press
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Herman Melville (1819–1891) Though Melville is now best known for his novels, including his masterpiece Moby-Dick, he also wrote a substantial body of poetry over the course of his career . Born into a prosperous family in New York City, Melville experienced an abrupt change of fortunes at the age of twelve. The death of his father left the family in poverty, and Melville’s formal education ended just a few years later. Lacking any job skills, he worked as a clerk, farmhand, and teacher; despairing at this narrow range of options,in Melville signed on as a sailor with a merchant ship bound for Liverpool, and thereafter he served for three years on whaling ships. Working side by side with men of all races and from all walks of life, Melville gained a perspective on the human condition that his privileged early childhood in New York could never have given him. When Melville returned to the United States, he began drafting a fictionalized account of his travels. His first two books, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life () and Omoo (),were great successes in spite of their sharp critique of white imperialism.This success enabled Melville to marry Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of Lemuel Shaw, the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and a supporter of the Fugitive Slave Law*.Though Melville’s experiences after his father’s death had given him a powerful sense of empathy with the poor and dispossessed, his close relationship with his father-in-law and his desire to write commercially successful books led him to present his radical ideas in an oblique fashion. In his novels, Melville alternated between conventional and experimental strategies, hoping to write a book that would both satisfy public taste and express his arguments about the injustices of capitalism, slavery, and imperialism. In Moby-Dick, Melville represents a whaling voyage as an epic about the human struggle to assert mastery over nature at the same time as he indicts theories of white racial superiority.Though Melville wrote several novels and many short stories, he was never able to support his family with his writing. In , a deeply depressed Melville accepted a job as a customs inspector in New York City; he held this position for the next twenty years. Though Battle-Pieces and Aspects of theWar () was Melville’s first published volume of poetry, he had been writing poetry for several years before the volume appeared. For the rest of his career, with the exception of a few short prose works, he would write nothing but poetry. As a crisis of national identity, the Civil War clearly brought Melville a renewed sense of purpose as a writer. Though he did not serve in the military, his family connections to the war were direct and numerous . One cousin was a naval commander, and Melville visited another cousin at the front; after touring battlefields, he rode out with the cavalry on a three-day mission. Melville also followed the war’s moment-by-moment developments in the newspapers. In addition to his response to the war, one senses in Battle-Pieces Melville’s desire to invent a new kind of poetry, a poetry that could look un- flinchingly at the horrors of war even as it also questioned the possibility of representing those horrors in writing. Battle-Pieces offers a critical intervention into the lyric tradition, suggesting that poetry might meld traditional formal commitments with a new kind of realism that could encompass both the complexity of the ideologies which fuel wars and the ethical dilemmas which representing war poses for writers. The Portent1 () Hanging from the beam, Slowly swaying (such the law), Gaunt the shadow on your green, Shenandoah! The cut is on the crown (Lo, John Brown), And the stabs shall heal no more. Hidden in the cap Is the anguish none can draw; So your future veils its face, Shenandoah! But the streaming beard is shown (Weird John Brown), The meteor of the war. C V C W P . The following poems are cited from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York: Harper and Brothers, ). In “The Portent,” Melville responds to John Brown’s abortive uprising (see Time Line, October ) and his hanging, both of which took place in the Shenandoah River valley.This valley was also the site of particularly violent and destructive military campaigns during the war. [35.175.201.245] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:38 GMT) Apathy and Enthusiasm...