|
Melville, Poet?
Melville’s turn to poetry has been perceived as resulting from the author’s necessity to reinvent himself after the failure of his previous career as a prose writer, which left in him a feeling of having been neglected that pushed him into a literary silence of nine years between the publication of The Confidence-Man (1857) and Battle- Pieces (1866). Though it is true that Melville was indeed reinventing himself literarily during these years, it is also certain he had read poetry extensively and had written poems before this period, probably as early as in his adolescence and early youth. This is shown, for example, by his contributions to his school magazine, as well as by his poetical satires of the heroes of the Mexican War (1846-1848). Today, the extent of Melville’s literary silence between 1857 and 1866 is starting to be questioned. Most significantly, Hershel Parker15 has engaged in the analysis of Melville’s career as a poet, counteracting the until-now dominant myth that Melville abandoned prose and turned to poetry only during the war in order to overcome his feeling of having been deliberately ignored as a prose writer. Nonetheless, Melville possibly used the Civil War –the event that, he thought, would renew the whole nation– to renew himself in the eyes of readers who continued to reduce his whole career to Typee and Omoo, two novels Melville himself despised calling them “Piddledee” and “Hullabaloo”, respectively (“Melville’s Reflections”). Moreover, he probably considered that the war was the necessary
15 Parker has very recently devoted an extensive and rigorous study to Melville’s relation with poetry: Melville: The Making of the Poet (2008). However, in his 2002 biography of the author, he had already pointed toward new directions for the study of Melville as a poet and not as a mere disappointed writer that begun flirting with poetry in order to overcome his feeling of being neglected.
opportunity to acquire the literary recognition he thought he deserved, since it offered him the possibility of re-launching his career.
We can only speculate about why Melville chose poetry to write about the Civil War.16 Though he, apparently, had wanted to keep it secret he had been writing poetry, in mid-1859, Melville sent a note17 to the Harpers asking them to publish two of his poems in their magazine, which were eventually rejected. That refusal did not prevent him from continuing increasing his poetic production, which may have been considerable by 1860, before embarking on his trip aboard the Meteor, the ship captained by his brother Tom. It was at that time that he left very detailed instructions18 to his brother Allan and, especially, to his wife Lizzie for the publication of what was meant to be his first volume of poems, which he wanted to be simply titled “Poems by Herman Melville” without mentioning “[f]or God’s sake … By the author of ‘Typee’ ‘Piddledee’ &c on the title-page” (Letters 199). When the Meteor reached San Francisco, however, Melville did not find himself a published poet. At his arrival, he received a letter from Lizzie informing him of the refusal of Poems,19 at the same time that his wife expressed her belief in the value of his poems. But little did these words comfort Melville at this point, who returned home feeling a failed poet. Nevertheless, Melville’s first book of poetry cannot be ignored even though it never reached publication.20
16 We will address this question when we reach the comparison between Whitman and Melville at the end of this paper.
17 The note read: “Here are two Pieces, which, if you find them suited to your Magazine I should be happy to see them appear there.—In case of publication, you may, if you please, send me what you think they are worth” (Letters 194).
18 See Melville’s “Memoranda for Allan concerning the publication of my verses” in Letters 198-199.
19 Even though this volume was never published, in our paper we will follow Parker and refer to it in italics as
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
