Melville & Poetry
Melville and Poetry
Poetry was a life-long pursuit of Melville, particularly after the commercial and critical “failure” of his later novels. Elizabeth Shaw Melville wrote to her mother in 1859 that “Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell any one, for you know how such things get around.” Few readers of Moby-Dick were aware that Melville was a poet, although he had published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War in 1866 and the 18,000-line Clarel in 1876. Vincent’s volume reprints the published poems (though only selections from Clarel), poems embedded in Mardi and Moby-Dick, and transcriptions of unpublished poetry, including “Billy in the Darbies.”
Herman Melville.
Collected Poems.
Edited by Howard P. Vincent.
Chicago: Packard and Company Hendricks House, 1947.
Hendricks House, with Howard Vincent as general editor, intended this to be one volume in the complete works of Melville, but that broader goal was only partially realized. That this was the first American edition of the complete poems was, in Vincent’s view, “a scathing indictment of the neglect of America’s most powerful literary genius.”
Herman Melville.
Selected Poems: A Reader’s Edition.
Edited by Robert Penn Warren.
New York: Random House, 1970.
Inscribed by author to Marie Bullock (Founder, The American Academy of Poets)
Robert Penn Warren had a distinguished career as a teacher, critic, novelist, and poet that included three Pulitzer Prizes, the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and the designation in 1986 as America’s first official Poet Laureate. Warren presents himself as an individual, even eccentric, “reader” and provides his extensive analysis and critique of “Billy in the Darbies,” characterizing it as the “innermost” part of the “inside” story of Billy Budd. Warren’s ringing conclusion is that “Billy in the Darbies” is “certainly Melville’s most nearly perfect poem ... in which he achieves complete mastery of style and, shall we say, of his life.”
Herman Melville.
Selected Poems.
Edited by Helen Vendler.
San Francisco: The Arion Press, 1995.
No. 189 of edition of 250.
In 2006, The New York Times called Helen Vendler the “leading poetry critic in America” and in 2023, she was awarded the highest honor for criticism by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the introduction to this collection, she notes that Melville’s “arresting and wholly original poetry” is from the same mind that produced Moby-Dick, “the greatest American novel.” Vendler describes the poetry of Melville’s maturity as learned and philosophical but asserts that its relative unpopularity has been the result of his “despairing view of sexuality, war, politics, and religion.”
This selection of Melville’s poetry is the 47th publication of The Arion Press and shares elements of their sixth publication in 1979, Moby-Dick. Barry Moser, the artist whose illustrations enhanced that earlier monument in the art of bookmaking, engraved and signed a new portrait of an older Melville for the frontispiece of Selected Poems, seen here with the title page.
W. H. Auden.
Signed typescript of his poem “Herman Melville.”
This 41-line poem, dedicated to Lincoln Kirsten, was first published in The Southern Review in Autumn 1939 and includes: “And we are introduced to Goodness every day, ... He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect.”