HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, EDGAR ALLAN POE, HENRY DAVID THOREAU, HERMAN MELVILLE
Emerson surprised British readers, but—judging from Arnold—enthusiasm turned to a more temperate response, bordering on distrust. He was a persuasive speaker, he seemed on a level with Carlyle; but was he not also too protean, too one-size-fits-all with his baggy sentences and capacious ideas? Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, on the other hand, could sing. He could tell stories about America. Maybe his forms were imported, but they were tempered and transformed by his fantastic world. He provides an alternative to the gothic even as he shares in some of its preposterous attitudes and posturings.
All solemn Voices of the Night,
That can soothe thee or afright,—
Be these henceforth thy theme.
He became a best-seller. Is it true that ten thousand copies of The Courtship of Miles Standish were sold in London on one day? Judging from stock in second-hand bookshops today he was bought and cherished for a few generations, then turned out. The Song of Hiawatha was in vogue in all the languages of Europe, even translated into Latin by the brother of Cardinal Newman. For Europeans, American poetry was Longfellow.
He was born in 1807 in Portland, Maine, and in “My Lost Youth” he evokes the trees, the black wharves, the ships and sailors, the fort, and that sense of loss we all experience returning to a place once dear to find the spaces we thought were ours have closed over:
Strange to me now are the forms I meet
When I visit the dear old town;
But the native air is pure and sweet,
And the trees that o’ershadow each well-known street,
As they balance up and down,
Are singing the beautiful song,
Are sighing and whispering still:
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”
That native air moves the boughs to “balance,” momentarily suggesting the movement of Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Only Stevens in later American poetry is musical in the ways that Longfellow at his best can be.
He attended the then-new Bowdoin College at Brunswick, Maine, where he shone. He graduated in the class of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Bowdoin offered him a new chair of modern languages, freeing him from his father’s proposed course, that he should follow him in the law. Longfellow was already being published and acclaimed, especially for his translations. He visited Europe before he began his university job: France, Spain, Italy and Germany were on his itinerary, and on his return he wrote textbooks for his courses and prepared further translations.
He married (for love) and took a professorship of French and Spanish at Harvard. He visited Europe with his wife, who lost their child and died in Holland. He returned alone to Harvard and entered the famous rented lodgings at Craigie House in Cambridge, his final home. There he wrote Hyperion, about a youth who travels to forget sorrow. Voices of the Night was his first book of poems. It appeared in 1839. “The Psalm of Life” grits its famous teeth with fortitude:
Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
“And now I long to try a loftier strain, the sublimer Song whose broken melodies have for so many years breathed through my soul in the better hours of life, and which I trust and believe will ere long unite themselves into a symphony not all unworthy the sublime theme, but furnishing ‘some equivalent expression for the trouble and wrath of life, for its sorrow and its mystery.’ ” Two years later, Ballads and Other Poems put him firmly in the frame. It was what the public wanted and it makes us wonder why Whitman so admired the poet as a “counteractant” to the materialism and egotism of “an age tyrannically regulated with reference to the manufacturer, the merchant, the financier, the politician.” The spirit of the age may have wafted through Longfellow; but there must have been an element of calculation in the rumbustious, the tight-lipped and heroic figures he traced in “Excelsior” and elsewhere. He seems to combine the assured rhetoric of the Tennyson of the Idylls, with the exuberance of Browning on one hand and of the Borders balladeers on the other. It’s a heady mix: popular and folk poetry tailored for the wide-eyed bourgeoisie.
A third visit to Europe included a stay with Dickens, another writer who knew how to assess and work an audience. They went slumming together one night in 1842, shortly after Dickens’s own return from the New World, which had so beguiled and puzzled him. Dickens and others helped inspire the Poems on Slavery, which Longfellow composed on his way home.
In 1843 he married again and his new father-in-law gave them Craigie House. His wife gave him six children; he wrote, published and was happy, growing more popular with each book, even his verse drama. For him the language of verse was an aloud language, and sound counted as much as—or more than—sense. In the toils of sound he sails near to nonsense—too near, perhaps. Yet also in the toils of sound he will, much to Arnold’s annoyance, break the rules of his chosen prosodies, especially hexameters, when his ear tells him to. He privileges his ear over the form, and some of his finest prosodic effects are in the unexpected variations that possess an inexplicable rightness. It was Evangeline, the first substantial poem of real length from America, published in 1847, whose hexameters beguiled and irritated Arnold. Rhapsodic but stiff, the music cannot trace the subtleties of feeling, though it answers the theme of natural recurrence almost too well.
So came the autumn, and passed, and the winter,—yet Gabriel came not;
Blossomed the opening spring and the notes of the robin and bluebird
Sounded sweet upon the wold and in wood, yet Gabriel came not.
He knew the risks he was taking, and they were worth taking at the time. It is a risk comparable to poulter’s measure in the sixteenth century, and equally treacherous. He deployed it again in The Courtship of Miles Standish.
In 1849 he published The Seaside and the Fireside, in 1851 The Golden Legend and four years later the immortal (and some would say unbearable) Song of Hiawatha. Hiawatha lives and dies, a figure out of legend translated into the rhythms of the great Finnish national poem, the Kalevala, with which Longfellow the philologist was familiar.
Should you ask where Nawadaha
Found these songs so wild and wayward,
Found these legends and traditions,
I should answer, I should tell you,
“In the bird’s-nests of the forest,
In the lodges of the beaver,
In the hoof-prints of the bison,
In the eyry of the eagle!”
Abandoned to his meter, which is a kind of inverted iambic tetrameter, TUM-te-TUM-te-TUM-te-TUM-te, each line end-stopped, the poem proceeds on its irregular, repetitive way: a literary poem pretending to belong to the oral tradition and guaranteed, when read aloud to small children, to fill them briefly with wonder and then with sleep.
Critics are harsh. An early Boston review disliked the subject matter, “silly legends of the aborigines.” Poor didactic verse, perhaps—that may be its merit. Few understood the magic of the meter. In the end that is what matters here, and a diction ushering into verse, as if for the first time, a whole new tribe of words. It is not epic, neither is it ethnography. It is a poem of origins and the discovery of new starting places: in Finland, in the wigwam, with the beaver and the bison.
Longfellow resigned his chair in 1854 in order to write more. But his second wife, also dearly loved, died suddenly. While she was sealing a letter with wax, her dress caught fire from a taper. Longfellow himself suffered severe burns in trying to save her. He was changed, physically and spiritually. He undertook a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, completing it in 1867 and working on other poems as well, many addressed to his huge readership, but keeping the best for himself.
In 1872 his trilogy, Christus, appeared. He thought it his best work, though few today would agree with him. He was unstoppable and the verse kept flowing until 1881, when he began to fail. The next year he died, at the age of seventy-five. He was at the height of his popularity, dividing the age with Tennyson, and his influence on other poets (often unacknowledged because an enthusiasm for his work is not quite proper) was and perhaps still is great: on Kipling, on Swinburne and Hardy—and on Stevens? On the Philip Larkin of “The Explosion”? That busybody Amy Lowell was too close to the reputation to appreciate the work: she saw it as her mission to purge poetry of his bad effects. She would have to rid the world of Edward Lear and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), whose nonsense verse strays into the musical zones that Longfellow mapped with his self-propelling meters.
In England he had received doctorates honoris causa from Cambridge and Oxford and the queen had granted him an audience, but the greatest honor was conferred two years after he died. He was the first American poet to find himself, in bust, in Poets’ Corner with Chaucer, Dryden and the rest.
If Longfellow had modern readers, they would easily recognize his faults. He writes with excessive fluency, the poem sometimes gets away and romps on its own, and he can be cloyingly sentimental (as can Tennyson and Hardy). Excessive concentration on sound can actually degrade metaphor and sense. Incongruity of metaphor is often as striking as congruity. In Evangeline:
On the river
Fell here and there through the branches a tremulous gleam of moonlight
Like the sweet thoughts of love in a darkened and devious spirit.
It won’t do. Nor will the high-sounding metaphor whose resonance has no context—the famous “Footprints in the sands of time,” for example. He can seem to be sending himself up, but he was an earnest man, capable of broad humor though not of wit. He never takes an ironic glance at himself in the mirror. Like those of other poetic high priests of the Victorian age his poems may start in his experience but they borrow the wings of narrative or legend. Sometimes in a sonnet or a short lyric we meet another poet—for instance in “The Cross of Snow,” published posthumously and seeming real, though drawn from a book of pictures:
In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face—the face of one long dead—
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
Octave and sestet, rhyme, the discipline of meter, impose a passionate clarity on this poem of abiding grief. He suffered excessive popularity; he has now suffered three quarters of a century of critical neglect. But this does not mean he is unread. Even poets will occasionally, furtively, find themselves speechless before a poem such as “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls.”
It is the same furtive impulse that leads them to that other great anathema, Edgar Allan Poe. He never suffered in his lifetime, as Longfellow did, from popularity or prosperity. When Poe died, the egregious Rufus W. Griswold, who did his utmost to douse the flame of memory, wrote in the New York Tribune: “Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.” James Russell Lowell allowed him to be three-fifths genius, the balance fudge. As a critic Poe is five-fifths genius, the first great American theorist of verse and, in an entirely untub-thumping way, the first to declare independence: “We have snapped asunder the leading-strings of our British Grandmamma.”
At the age of fourteen Poe regarded poetry as instrumental, writing verses to woo girls, or miserable verse when he failed to do so. The mother of his friend Robert Stannard inspired his most perfect poem when Poe was fifteen or sixteen. He saw her standing by a window niche: “The light falling upon her, caught in her dark ringlets crossed by a white snood, glowed in the classic folds of her gown, and flowed about her slenderly graceful figure.” (The prose occasion is vivid, like something out of Flaubert—Charles Bovary observing Emma early in their courtship, for example.) This became the three-stanza poem “To Helen,” one of the most beautiful in the language:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore...
The poem is brief, intense, the diction precise and chaste, the meter carefully gauged, the sound values as important as they are in Longfellow but less raw, less superficial. The poem has no message: it is not about experience, it is an experience; and the closing lines recall “Kubla Khan” in their unparaphrasable certitude.
The didactic repelled him. So did extended narrative in verse. So did allegory. “In defence of allegory (however, or for whatever object, employed) there is scarcely one respectable word to be said,” he writes in a review of Hawthorne. He was impatient with Emerson and the Transcendentalists, who seemed to him unlikely to produce verse of any moment. They were too burdened with certainties and metacertainties, too passive, too full of self-respect. An oversoul could have little truck with a Muse. She is a particularist. Natural, metaphysical and aesthetic realms do not connect in a way convenient to the philosopher-poet.
“For the fullness of Poe’s vision,” says the poet Richard Wilbur, “one must go to the prose, but certain poems are partial distillations of it.” He selects, with his customary unerring taste, “Evening Star,” “Sonnet to Science,” “Fairyland,” “To Helen,” “The City in the Sea,” “To one in Paradise,” “The Haunted Palace,” “The Conqueror Worm,” “Eldorado” and “Annabel Lee” as the crucial Poe. No “Raven,” no “Ulalume,” no “Bells”? Certainly a great deal of death and afterlife, ghosts, otherworlds. Poe wrote in “The Philosophy of Composition,” “I asked myself—‘Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?’ Death—was the obvious reply. ‘And when,’ I said, ‘is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?’... ‘When it most closely allies itself to Beauty’: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” Poetry is, Poe says, “a wild effort to reach the beauty above,” and the poems move away: to the past, the future, another realm or star.
Poe’s lucidity as critic and (at his best) as poet is willed, not the fruit of an orderly upbringing. His parents were actors when he was born in Boston in 1809. By the age of three he was an orphan. His drinking, gambling father abandoned ship shortly after his birth; his mother moved to Richmond, Virginia, and died. The boy became the foster child of a Scottish merchant, John Allan (who provided Edgar’s middle name), and his wife. The Allans moved to England (1815–20) and Edgar went to school in Stoke Newington. They returned to Virginia. His foster parents quarreled interminably and the boy was not happy.
Poe fell in love at the age of seventeen with Sarah Elmira Royster and she responded. But when he went up to the University of Virginia, her parents stood between them and she married a Mr. Shelton. (In the last year of Poe’s life, when she was widowed, he again asked for her hand and was denied.) At university he did well in classics and French, but he drank, gambled and withdrew in 1826. It is hard to reconstruct his life: he left his literary estate to Griswold, who energetically rewrote the poet’s history, forged letters and invented episodes. The legends he set in motion are still repeated as fact. We do know that Poe and Allan fell out; Poe ran away to Boston and arranged for the publication of Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), meanwhile working as a clerk. Later that year he joined the army, and when Mrs. Allan died in 1829 he went home to Richmond and published another book, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems. The word “Aaraaf” says it all: a wonderful, impossible succession of vowels. Mr. Allan helped him get a place at the military college of West Point. His book got favorable notices and he left West Point to write. Then began his serious depressions and bouts of heavy drinking.
Poems: Second Edition appeared in his twenty-second year, and its critical introduction was a foretaste of the major essays to come. He wants a poetry with three primary qualities: indefinition, music and symbolism. “A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite Pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presented perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end, music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.”
From the outset Poe seeks out the extreme and intense. His verse is certainly extreme in its prosodic strategies and its “music.” He is extreme in the pressure he places on feeling over intellect, and on the way he plays the senses “all at once” by a kind of synesthesia. The “indefinition” is not the absence of content that we get from Swinburne but a fullness that cannot be paraphrased. The combinations of concrete and abstract words do not come from Augustan moral categories but from modulations of feeling and fear. He was hostile to Emerson in verse, chiding his universal oneness:
Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely flowers,
And the shadow of they perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.
His own Israfel emanates from somewhere else, from where he can see this world without being implicated in it.
Things began to improve for the poet. In 1832 he was living in poverty with an aunt. His stories began to have a vogue, he won a prize; in 1836 he married his cousin Virginia, and became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, in which appeared several stories and two important poems—“To One in Paradise” and “The Coliseum.” His pen was said to employ “vitriol for ink” and his critical writings began to be read. He did not suffer fools, or those he thought were fools (Longfellow, for example), but he was a strong advocate. In 1837 he went to Philadelphia as editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine for a year, and some of his best stories were published. In 1841 he edited Graham’s Magazine and published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
Success of a kind. But he stayed poor. His wife was dying. In 1844 he was in New York, and the next year “The Raven” came out, first in a paper and then in the book The Raven and Other Poems, the key volume. His foes took the opportunity and avenged themselves in reviews. He brought out the essay “Philosophy of Composition,” describing how “The Raven” came to be, but he was critically maimed. In 1847 his wife died and he returned to the bottle.
“Ulalume,” in 1848, was a masterpiece. But he knew his end was approaching. To a friend he wrote: “I am constitutionally sensitive—nervous in a very unusual degree. I become insane, with long intervals of horrible insanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drink, God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity.” “Eureka: A Prose Poem” was the last work he saw published. His sense of unity was unlike Emerson’s: “We should aim at so arranging the incidents that we shall not be able to determine of anyone of them, whether it depends from anyone other or upholds it.” A year later he died.
In “The Poetic Principle” he sets out his famous argument, that a long poem is a contradiction in terms: “A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites by elevating the soul”; a poem of length will not be able to keep up the excitement. It will fall into didactic mode, and that is the greatest heresy.
The body of his poetic work is small, but its impact was great—great not where it might have been expected to detonate, in America, or in an England sliding inexorably toward Swinburne, but in France. His essays, poems and fictions were hugely admired; he was in France what Longfellow was in England: the great American poet.
The French were getting symbolism together. They warmed to Poe’s idea of the poem as itself, noninstrumental, nondidactic, something that cannot be paraphrased, appropriated, analyzed. The questions a poem raises are of form, not of content; of process, not of product. Any scene that is painted will not be literal, any geography adduced will be imaginary. The poem will be comprehended, but that comprehension will be nontransferable. The rhythm of meanings in “The Raven”—despite attempts to misread it thus—is not allegorical. The raven derives its meaning from the poem and means only within the poem.
A poem says nothing, it means nothing, but it does something. It was to this that Charles Baudelaire responded, translating the writings into French and fueling the Gallic passion for the storyteller and poet. Poe is crucial to the emerging definition of symbolism, of a poetry that will not describe but instill feelings, emotions. What matters is the ways in which sounds and images, whole and fragmentary, come together. His poetry and stories—dubbed “evil” by his detractors—do open out into dark areas of experience and feeling. He writes, “Through the promptings of perverseness we act without comprehensible object... Through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not.” André Gide called it the acte gratuit; like the poets, he loved Poe as a writer and exemplar, misreading him as a moral (because amoral) teacher. He seems to ignore the centrality of guilt in the stories, as crucial as the sense of loss in the poems. Fyodor Dostoevsky is nearer to Poe in his fiction than any American successors. For a time it was not only France (Debussy and Ravel as well as the poets) and Russia (Chekhov and Turgenev too) that welcomed him, but England: Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Aubrey Beardsley. It was a short step from Poe’s sense of art’s autonomy to the fin-de-siècle “art for art’s sake.” In Poe rather than in Emerson and Longfellow, whose roots still fed back into Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, American literature becomes original in ways that he himself defines. “We have at length arrived at that epoch when our literature may and must stand on its own merits or fall through its own defects.” Like Longfellow, Poe is in eclipse and has been for quite a spell. Yet like Longfellow, he too has furtive readers. Those who read his poems attentively will have rhythms and phrases lodged in memory for good, so infectious is the near-nonsense magic of his language, so delicious the melancholy he induces. Unless we read in an ironical mood, in which case the poems become merely preposterous.
Not so preposterous, however, as the poetry of another great prose writer, Henry David Thoreau, whose importance is less as a poet than as a man who cleared a few more acres in the American forest for a native poetry to be seeded. His sense of what a poet must be is larger and more amorphous than Shelley’s even. He borrowed some of his prose techniques from Emerson, though his phrasing is more succinct. “He must be something more than natural—even supernatural. Nature will not speak through but along with him. His voice will not proceed from her midst, but, breathing on her, will make her the expression of his thought.” This is all familiar Transcendentalist stuff. What follows might seem more attuned to Poe: “He then poetises when he takes a fact out of nature into spirit. He speaks without reference to time or place. His thought is one world, hers another.” Then he reverts to Emersonizing: “He is another Nature—Nature’s brother. Kindly offices do they perform for one another. Each publishes the other’s truth.” Such intellectualizing exists at the level of theory. What a poet must be and must do exist at some distance from what poems are and do.
Born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau had a severe upbringing. He went to Harvard, became enthralled by the classics and tried to translate Aeschylus. He intended to earn his living as a surveyor. In his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he alludes widely to classical literature, quoting also from Gower, Shakespeare, Quarles, Milton, Byron, Tennyson—and Emerson. Emerson invited Thoreau to live with him, discovered he wrote verse, and encouraged him in Emersonian measures. The arrangement did not work. Thoreau’s temperament was oppositional: he disliked Puritanism, the state and the social order. His essay “Civil Disobedience” remains his most influential prose work—or his most influential title, since few now take the trouble to consult the excellent essay. “That government is best which governs least... I quietly declare war with the State after my fashion, though I will still make use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases.” There are other essays, and there is Walden (1854), read now generally in extracts, about his attempted life of self-sufficiency and individual husbandry at Walden Pond, on land that Emerson owned. During this time he refused to pay tax because his country was waging war against Mexico. The gesture was less eloquent than it might have been: his aunt Maria bailed him out after only one night’s incarceration. He found it difficult to forgive her.
Tubercular, he caught a chill while surveying tree stumps in 1860 and never recovered. In 1862 he died. His journals were published posthumously and Poems on Nature appeared in 1895. The poems—most of them the work of his youth—lack the virtues of the prose, which has a spoken feel, homespun in its metaphors, astute in its moralizing. The poems also moralize. He is oracle and witness at the same time, so that he raises his voice before he has much to say. There are some wonderful moments when the volume is kept steady and the tone approaches conversation, as in “Conscience is Instinct Bred in the House”:
Conscience is instinct bred in the house.
Feeling and thinking propagate the sin
By an unnatural breeding in and in.
I say, Turn it outdoors
Into the moors
I love a life whose plot is simple...
But what does he go on to say?
And does not thicken with every pimple,
A soul so sound no sickly conscience binds it,
That makes the universe no worse than ’t finds it.
Meter and diction run out of control and are curbed by a willful violence, to sound and sense. More consistent is “Smoke,” where in an almost Poelike spirit the image is conjured but (by its very nature) left undefined:
Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
This is the translator of Aeschylus at work. He has read Emerson and Longfellow (that “nest”) but the rhythms are his own. They work well again in “Haze”:
Woof of the sun, ethereal gauze,
Woven of Nature’s richest stuffs,
Visible heat, air-water, and dry sea,
Last conquest of the eye...
He has the courage to leave an image lean, even incomplete, so that we bring it into being, supplying part of the matter. As in the prose of Walden, there is sometimes a sense of collaboration as we read. A poem addresses its subject, like Herbert addressing “Prayer,” and it contains its meanings. In “Sic Vita” the poet works toward a kind of metaphysical note.
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.
Even the conventions of indentation belong to the seventeenth century, the long lines with most accents ranged left, the shortest furthest indented. The poem almost succeeds, and this is a tribute to Thoreau’s formal skills, which he was ready to abandon too soon.
His is an individual voice, but the individuality has more to do with his personality and what he writes about than with his formally defined voice. He avoids Emerson’s syntactical solecisms and he flies closer—generally—to our material world. Emerson remarked of his poems: “The thyme and marjoram are not yet made into honey.”
Emerson, Poe, Thoreau—great prose writers who are also poets. And then Herman Melville. “I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed, and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould,” he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne in the midst of composing Moby-Dick, filled with self-wonder and self-doubt.
He wrote a great deal of verse, much of it published posthumously, so that he only becomes properly available in the mid-twentieth century, and the jury remains divided. Randall Jarrell declares: “Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville seem to me the best poets of the nineteenth century here in America... Melville’s poetry has been grossly underestimated.” “Some critics,” says the poet Robert Penn Warren, “would place his name among the most important American poets of the nineteenth century, or even today.” Some wouldn’t.
The American Civil War brought his poetry to a topical head, though he had written verse before. Battle-Pieces appeared in 1866. The initial impulse was almost journalistic, but the poetry of such a writer, with his definite sense of evil and good (in that order), and his feeling for his own nation and the people involved at all levels in its murderous turbulence, took the poetry beyond its initial impulse. A Unionist strongly opposed to slavery, he was able to foresee, as Walt Whitman did, some of the bad consequences of just action. “But the Founders’ dream shall flee.” In “The March into Virginia” he shows the jollity of confidence—carriages accompanying the soldiers to watch the sport—in all its stupid innocence; and the consequences of battle itself. The wind blows one way, he says, but always with unpredictable back-currents. “It spins against the way it drives.” This is history’s way too, apparently possessed and driven by ideas and reaching resolutions, but never more than miasmically under control.
Readers of Moby Dick know how richly Jacobean Melville’s writing can be, how erudite in reference and allusion, but the erudition is that of a man of culture and of action, not a scholar or critic. On the decks of his ships a Portuguese sailor will recite Camões and no one will bat an eye. Dante and Homer, King David and Milton, Virgil and Shakespeare are living presences in the language. The poetry is less deliberately poetical than the prose, generally more economical and direct and, like the prose, often based on actual experiences of travel, of politics and religion, with a genuine urgency of engagement.
He was born in New York in 1819. His father, a prosperous businessman, went bankrupt and mad, dying before Melville was thirteen and leaving a large family. Melville and his siblings worked hard. He was a clerk, a teacher, a farm worker, and then at eighteen he signed on as a ship’s boy. He sailed widely, deserting his ship the Acushnet in the Marquesa Islands, where he lived for a time with the “cannibal” Typee. Escaping on board a whaling ship from Australia, he was detained in Tahiti as the member of a mutiny. He finally returned to Boston in 1844. He married a woman of means and in 1847 settled in New York, where he found his way into a vigorous literary world. He wrote his early, successful prose books Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847). Their subject matter was sensational: adventure and cannibalism. The allegory on political and religious themes Mardi (1849) was rejected as too abstruse. He went back to straight storytelling in Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), realizing that he could only succeed when he provided what the market demanded. He began to uncover the cruel reality of life and law at sea.
Moby Dick proved hard and exhausting to write. But he knew it was original and he understood that it was good. Published in 1851, it was not a success; until the first quarter of the twentieth century it was neglected. Ambitious later books were rejected. The failure of Moby Dick helped turn his primary attention to verse. Battle-Pieces (1866) was welcomed as peripheral work by a man who had once been famous for his prose. Seriously disturbed in his mind, he made a trip to the Holy Land (meeting with Hawthorne in Southport en route), and out of this visit emerged his most ambitious if not his most accomplished poem, the 18,000-line Clarel, twice as long as Paradise Lost, and in the octosyllabic couplets of Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Eventually, Melville—after working as a minor customs officer in New York—was reduced to dependence on his wife’s money: she gave him an allowance to buy books and to print his later works in small editions for the tiny readership he retained. He died in 1891, quite forgotten, with the manuscript of the prose work Billy Budd completed but unpublished. His reputation was at such a low ebb that even this masterpiece went unpublished until 1924. More poems appeared in the same year.
Some of Melville’s poems relate to the novels and can be read in conjunction with them, as extensions or distillations. The themes overlap. Prose and verse are in his view closely related, as he suggests in “Art”:
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.
The poet’s challenge is to synthesize from diverse and discrepant material, to move from the passivity of response to the activity of creation, what T. S. Eliot calls “the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings.” In a single action the wound is made, the bow is acknowledged. Opposites and contrasts are not resolved but held in tension.
It is hard not to feel, with Whitman so very near at hand, that Melville’s tragedy was formal: had he been able to find a form less constraining, less distorting of his natural impulse, more responsive to the kinds of cadence and natural vigor that find a way into his prose, he might have been a radical presence in his nation and century. But the Augustan legacy and his own educational culture weighed upon his verse intelligence. His pilgrimage to the Holy Land was intended to rediscover his faith and to expose the ambivalences of his heart to a land of austere clarities. In Clarel he tries to be didactic but has no certainties to impart: he challenges himself spiritually but does not rise to the challenge. He raises more questions than he can answer: like us he is learning, feeling his way. Clarel is a pilgrim, an American student of theology in search of faith who dos not reach his destination. Clarel neglects the heart, and a man cannot reach truth or understanding unless his heart is wholly with him.
Melville’s poems, less sumptuous in semantic nuance than the prose, less second nature to him than his fiction, are worked at and worked up, yet the difficulty of the restraining forms remains central. So does the rumor of an “unspeakable” theme, unacknowledged at times, at times veiled from himself, which has to do with a radiant sexual irresolution. More insistently even than Conrad, Melville depicts a male world in prose and verse, a world in which intimate relationships and erotic experiences are between men and types of men: at sea, in the army and elsewhere. He celebrates, laments, touches—and he occasionally foresees, not with the huge and benign vision of Walt Whitman, but with narrowed eyes, looking further than the future. His is not the optimism of Emerson but something more serious: he sees beyond a bad age, he sees to the other side of evil; nature consoles, but it also remembers and comments.
We elms of Malvern Hill
Remember every thing:
But sap the twig will fill:
Wag the world how it will,
Leaves must be green in Spring.
It is not necessary to look into the “facts” of Melville’s life, to which it would be presumptuous for us to assign specific weight among the other known—and unknown—facts: his affection for Hawthorne, his strained marriage, the suicide of one of his sons and the loss of another. What we have unarguably before us is the writing: what it says and what it does not say. In verse as in prose, seriousness deepens with imaginative candor (especially in his late fictional masterpiece Billy Budd), certain elements progressively gain definition, elements that may have contributed to his eclipse as critics and readers turned away from something they could not quite comprehend or countenance. And this, too, is a new world.