Melville

by Hershel Parker

""Poetry was just a sideline with Melville; it was never important to him," pronounced Alfred Kazin, in a judgment frequently echoed by critics today. In this study, Hershel Parker shows that, on the contrary, Melville was enthralled by poetry for much of his life and wrote almost nothing else for a third of a century." "Parker demonstrates that from childhood Melville was steeped in British poetry from Spenser to Byron, including dozens of poets now little read even by specialists. In 1849 Melville's ecstatic study of Shakespeare renewed his love of poetry just as he was becoming a great prose writer. Rereading Milton and Spenser, he experienced them with such recharged intensity that he became passionately immersed in Wordsworth, Tennyson, the Brownings, and other modern poets as well. Parker explores the author's marginalia, much of it previously unknown, to elucidate Melville's shrewd, skeptical engagement with British poetry and with commentaries by poets, aestheticians, art histo