Published March 4, 2008 | By
Robert
Sandberg
Anyone wanting to know Herman Melville the poet and how much
poetry meant to him all of his life would do well to start with Hershel
Parker’s Melville: The Making of the Poet. This book will surely prove
foundational in the coming years and decades as Melville enthusiasts and
scholars come to enjoy easy access to Melville’s poetry — many for the first
time — as it becomes readily available in the forthcoming final two volumes of
the Northwestern-Newberry series, The Writings of Herman Melville.
Parker intentionally does not excerpt or quote much of Melville’s poetry, nor
does he offer extended discussions concerning Melville’s status as a poet. However
he does suggest that Melville’s poetry might be favorably ranked with the
poetry of Dickinson, Whitman, the Brownings, and Tennyson. Parker is not alone
in suggesting and arguing for the worth of Melville’s poetry. Many poets,
readers, and critics have praised Melville’s poetic writings — Robert Penn
Warren, Muriel Rukeyser (The Life
of Poetry), and, more recently, Helen Vendler (Poems,
Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology), to name just a
few.
What Parker does do in Melville: The Making of the Poet is
cite, document, and discuss thoroughly the evidence related to Melville’s
reading and study of poetry from his earliest years that renders obsolete and
unsustainable the unfounded, inaccurate view that poetry for Melville was a
sideline, an afterthought, a way to escape the disappointing contemporary
reception and poor sales of prose masterworks like Moby-Dick. In
following Melville’s reading and book buying, Parker shows us glimpses of him
finding, reading, and purchasing works (e.g., purchasing on October 27, 1861
Henry Taylor’s Notes from Life in Seven Essays that encouraged him to
assume the identity of a poet and pursue the sort of life best suited to the
writing of poetry.
Finally, perhaps not the least of the facts you will learn when
reading Melville: The Making of the Poet, are those related to Parker’s
re-telling and re-documenting (the evidence has been lying in plain site for
decades) Melville’s failed, but very real, attempt to publish in 1860 what
would have been his first published volume of poetry, titled simply, by
Melville himself, Poems.
If you want to understand and appreciate Melville the poet and the
poetry he wrote, this is an essential, foundational book to add to your reading
library.
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