Vendler in the 5 December 2019 NYRofB and /r/literature on Melville's Poetry--Warren, Parker, Bloom, Vendler

After reading Helen Vendler's review of the Library of America HERMAN MELVILLE: COMPLETE POEMS in the 5 December 2019 NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS I have been looking around at the slow recognition of Melville's poetry. As late as 1997 Alfred Kazin could say, "You have to remember that poetry was just a sideline with Melville; it was never important to him and he was never good at it." This was at a Barnes & Noble session with Paul Metcalf and me. I corrected Kazin mildly by pointing out that whatever he thought of the poetry, it was what Melville wrote for a third of a century. In 2002 I was stunned that, ignoring all the documentation, three reviewers of the second volume of my biography of Melville, Richard Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Foster, all expressed doubt that Melville had tried to publish POEMS in 1860 and even suggested that I had made the volume up--this despite his notes to his brother Allan on how he wanted the book published. The contemptuous ignorance of these reviews has had a strange afterlife. As recently as 2019, in the June issue of LEVIATHAN, John Bryant recalls these reviews (not naming the culprits), saying this: "one reviewer stated that Parker 'surmises' the existence of the volume--a fair-enough verb given the indirect though conclusive evidence at hand." Of course I was not surmising, not with the existence of the 12-point "Memoranda for Allan concerning the publication of my verses." "Fair enough?" What a strange thing to say about a willful blindness to evidence. There is high-minded skepticism but there is also willful distortion of evidence. My MELVILLE: THE MAKING OF THE POET (2008) was an outgrowth of my conviction of the importance of Melville's poetry, and the importance of recognizing that he started training himself as a poet as early as 1857 or certainly by 1858.   In a review of the 2008 book, Robert Faggen said, "Parker doesn't attempt here to answer Kazin's second point in any detail, though he makes it very clear that he regards Melville as a great poet, as have Helen Vendler, Lawrence Buell, William Spengemann and Robert Penn Warren. But perhaps no one has led the scholarly charge on this question with as much force as Parker. By setting once and for all the biographical and cultural context of Melville's efforts, Parker hopes that there can be a more focused, informed appreciation of Melville's accomplishment as a poet. And what a great and often thrilling achievement it is."

How strange to have the journal LEVIATHAN celebrating Melville's second volume of poems, BATTLE-PIECES, as his "inaugural" volume of poetry! How strange to have John Bryant in 2019 calling 2002 reviewer's contempt for my "surmises" about the existence of POEMS a "fair-enough verb"! You see why it is so very important that Dennis Zhou in the 25 October 2019 TLS and Helen Vendler in the 5 December 2019 NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, both reviewing the Library of America volume HERMAN MELVILLE: COMPLETE POEMS, have cut through all such nonsense to treat POEMS as real, though what survives of it is debatable, and to treat BATTLE-PIECES as his first volume of poems to be published, but not the first one he prepared for publication, and to treat CLAREL as a great poem.

This is from /r/literature, apparently around 2016:

Herman Melville's often popular for his prose writing, and he has earned his place as one of the great masters of American prose alongside luminaries such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Don DeLillo.

What's often forgotten, even among staunch Melville fans, is his body of poetry. He's written the epic poem Clarel, which, whatever flaws it may have, has its defenders and admirers, three of them being Southern author Robert Penn Warren, Melville biographer and scholar Hershel Parker and Melville admirer Harold Bloom. He, being one of the first proto-modernist poets, also wrote many Civil War poems, many of which compete with the best poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and Melville's poetry has its admirers, including Helen Vendler, who said of Clarel:

What it cost Melville to write this poem makes us pause, reading it. Alone, it is enough to win him, as a poet, what he called 'the belated funeral flower of fame.'"

So, while it is true that Melville's eminence lies primarily in his prose writing (and he is a prose-poet of the highest order, mixing poetry and prose in a way that has yet to be unrivaled), his poetry is still worthy of recognition.

Has anyone here on /r/literature read Melville's epic poem Clarel (or at least part of it) and/or any of his other poems?