… It’s a different story with Melville.’ ” - Jennifer Howard, “Chronicle” “Compare Melville to Mark Twain, for instance – a man who remained beloved throughout his life and after, up to the present. A best seller in its day, the book ‘made him as famous as he would ever be when he was alive,’ says Samuel Otter, an associate professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Melville’s Anatomies (University of California Press, 1999). When Typee came out in 1846, he was only 27 years old. “The paucity of primary sources derives in large part from the downward trajectory of Melville’s career. His reputation was at such a low ebb that even this masterpiece went unpublished until 1924.” - Michael Schmidt, The Lives of the Poets He died in 1891, quite forgotten, with the manuscript of the prose work Billy Budd completed but unpublished. Eventually, Melville – after working as a minor customs officer in New York – was reduced to dependence on his wife’s money: she gave him an allowance to buy books and to print his later works in small editions for the tiny readership he retained. Seriously disturbed in his mind, he made a trip to the Holy Land (meeting with Hawthorne in Southport en route), and out of this visit emerged his most ambitious if not his most accomplished poem, the 18,000-line Clarel, twice as long as Paradise Lost, and in the octo-syllabic couplets of Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Battle-Pieces (1866) was welcomed as peripheral work by a man who had once been famous for his prose. The failure of Moby Dick helped turn his primary attention to verse. Published in 1851, it was not a success until the first quarter of the twentieth century it was neglected. But he knew it was original and he understood that it was good. “ Moby Dick proved hard and exhausting to write.
They are friends and friendly they guide him to prey,Įyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull, In white triple tiers of glittering gates,Īnd there find a haven when peril’s abroad, The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,įrom his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw,
Oh, and I included a bit from a correspondence I had with a certain gentleman I was once in love with, where we covered the chapter from Moby Dick “The Whiteness of the Whale” in our email exchanges. They come from everywhere – from reviews of Moby Dick when it first came out (baffled, for the most part) – to John Huston’s comment on it, when directing the film – to Hart Crane’s stunning poem about Melville’s “tomb”. Moby-Dick is one of my all-time favorite books – so I figured I wouldn’t just re-hash that old territory – but compile here 5,000,000 quotes about Melville.
Herman Melville was born on this day in 1819.
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