MELVILLE'S SHORTER POEMS
1035
Poems, Leaves of Grass,
and
May-Day.
The one direction, which
Lanier took, was the one that Poe and Whitman had pointed toward
-an enhanced musicality, a more incantatory diction, an approach to
the indirections of symbolism. The other, which Emily Dickinson
took, was the one Emerson had hinted at-colloquialism, the prosaic,
the anti-poetic, the ironical. It was in this latter direction that Melville
moved, and in doing so, like Emily Dickinson, he "anticipated," as
literary historians like to say, a whole series of poets in the twentieth
century. But it is not as a mere precursor that one ought to speak of
him. He wrote as he did, not as the conscious founder of a school,
but because the natural development of his mind was what it was
in the years that ensued upon his great work in fiction. He not only
felt a distaste, like his European contemporaries, for Early Romantic
rhetoric and Early Romantic language; he was disabused and dis–
contented with all that was visionary, enthusiastic, and illusory in
romantic idealism itself. Instinctively he moved away not only from
the compensatory dream-world of Poe but from Emerson's repudiation
of positive Evil and from Whitman's too unmodulated Ye.:;'s. Like
Hardy, at very much the same time, he drew
his
essential force as a
poet from his quiet, obstinate insistence on seeing things, so far as
he might, in the light of the unideal Actual and not in the light of
his hopes and wishes. The simplifications neither of romantic despera–
tion nor of romantic confidence had any longer authority ·for him;
like Hardy, he aimed rather at doing justice to "the mournful many–
sidedness of things." Even when he returns, as in "The ft:olian
Harp," to one of the favorite symbols of romanticism, it is not to a
romantic but to an actualistic end. "Listen," he says
o~
the }Eolian
harp hanging in the window of a seaside inn-
Listen: less a strain ideal
T han Ariel's rendering of the Real.
In his own attempt to render the many-sidedness of reality,
without transcendental distortions, Melville worked out, no doubt
painfully, a poetic manner that, with all its miscarriages, had the
elements of a genuine newness in it, and that flm.o,'cred from time to
time in a magnificent line or poem. This was partly an affair of
sheer vocabulary. His impulse, not always an enlightened one, was to
put behind him the effete conventions of English romantic diction-
