Melville Among the Poets

Abstract

poetry, and lectures, a model that Melville would likely have had in mind as he made his own tour of the eastern Mediterranean in 1857. Following his lecture on “The Statues of Rome,” Melville evidently was studying material related to “At the Hostelry” and “Naples at the Time of Bomba” in 1859, suggesting that these poems would have been meant for inclusion in his lost 1860 volume of poetry. The development of prose prefaces for these and other of the “Burgundy Club” sketches amounts to a variation on cross-genre practices by Taylor and Curtis, and this experimentation with blending prose and poetic forms came from Melville’s desire to reach a wider audience with his dense, allusive poetry. “Melville, Warren, and the Making of American Poetry” Joseph Millichap Western Kentucky University Robert Penn Warren was one of the early champions of Melville’s poetry, and he continually returned to Melville at crucial moments in the development of his own career as a poet, starting with his first encounters with Moby-Dick as a Rhodes Scholar—first in film and soon thereafter in book form. Warren’s famous essay on Melville’s poetry showed his growth as a critic, as it moves from the close reading typical of the New Criticism espoused by his mentor, John Crowe Ransom, to larger concerns with the tension between form and theme in Melville’s work. This tension inspired Warren’s own experimentations with form, particularly his use of sequences of poems reminiscent of Battle-Pieces in works such as Audubon: A Vision (1972), which Warren wrote while working on his edition of Melville’s poems. As the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry, Warren also combined prose and poetry later in his career, likely with Battle-Pieces and “The Burgundy Club” sketches in mind. From the start of his career to its end, Melville was crucial for the “making of American poetry” for Warren, both in retrospect and in the new work the later poet generated himself.