Newlon Arvin
MELVILLE'S SHORTER POEMS
It is a curious fact, given the intensity of interest in Mel–
ville for the last thirty years, that his rather considerable body of verse
should hardly have been discussed at all. Three years ago, it is true, Mr.
Robert Penn Warren published in the
K enyon R eview
an extremely
perceptive essay on Melville's poems, and both Mr. Matthiessen and
Mr. Thorp have had illuminating things to say about them. But they
remain still, one gathers, largely unread and very little discussed, re–
markable as some of their qualities are; and it is on this account
that I venture to put together here a few further notes on the subject.
A fact about Melville's work as a poet that strikes one very early
is that he did virtually all of it in the midst not only of the most
pronounced personal solitude but of a real slump in American poetry.
It was a "bad" time for an American to be writing poetry, and it
seems to be true that, whenever this happens, a writer loses some–
thing irreplaceable, but that nevertheless, if the root of the matter is
in him, if the essential expressive faculty is there, his work will derive
a kind of painful and difficult beauty from his very disabilities. Cer–
tainly this was true of the only two other poets of genuine talent in
that long dull period that followed the Civil War, Sidney Lanier and
Emily Dickinson; and Melville seems to me to have been in much
the same plight they were. He did not have the support of the literary
gulf-stream that had borne Emerson, Poe, and Whitman along on
its benignant current, and .as a result his poems have everywhere the
aspect of having been brought to birth in something very like a dead
calm. This does not keep them from having a very particular au–
thenticity of their own.
There seem to have been two directions in which American poe–
try could move in the period that followed
Th e Raven and Othcr
