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Herman Melville: Complete Poems

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War | Clarel | John Marr and Other Sailors | Timoleon Etc. | Posthumous & Uncollected More

Edited by Hershel Parker

An unprecedented single-volume edition of one of America’s greatest poets, released to celebrate his bicentennial

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Herman Melville ranks with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as one of the three great American poets of the nineteenth century. Whether meditating on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, the mysteries of faith and doubt in the Holy Land, or the strange relationship between the Maldive Shark and the pilot fish that glide before “his Gorgonian head,” Melville’s verse combines precise physical detail and rich metaphysical speculation in an unorthodox style and with a compressed power uniquely his own. The fruit of decades of textual scholarship, this fourth and final volume of the Library of America Melville edition gathers for the first time in one volume all of Melville’s poems: the four books of poetry published in his lifetime, his uncollected poems, and the poems from two projected volumes of poetry and prose left unfinished at his death.

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), Melville’s first published book of poems, is one of the very few literary masterpieces to emerge from the Civil War. To read it today is to become immersed in the events of the great national crisis: the execution of “Weird John Brown,” the shock of the young Union soldiers at Bull Run “enlightened by the vollied glare,” the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack, the brutal New York City Draft Riots, and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. By turns elegiac and enthusiastic, horrified and hopeful, the book recreates the experience of the Civil War home front, distilled by Melville’s singular genius.

The heart of the volume is Melville’s epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), a work he spent seven years writing while employed as a New York customs inspector. The story of a young divinity student’s journey to Jerusalem and environs—a quest with both spiritual and sexual dimensions—the poem grew out of Melville’s own travels to Palestine two decades earlier. At 18,000 lines, it is one of the longest poems in the English language, inviting comparisons to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divine Comedy. It is also a deeply personal and revealing work, offering a picture of Melville’s complicated friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne through Clarel’s wavering attraction to a fellow traveler named Vine.

Also included here are the two late privately published collections, his haunting nautical book John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon Etc. (1891), the latter containing the celebrated poems “After the Pleasure Party” and “The Age of the Antonines.” Rounding out the volume are the poems from Melville’s two unfinished manuscripts, Weeds and Wildings and Parthenope, along with miscellaneous uncollected poems, including “Billy in the Darbies,” the ballad that sparked the composition of Billy Budd. All are presented in authoritative texts established by the multi-volume Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville.

Hershel Parker, editor, is the H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware, the General Editor for the final two volumes of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, and the author of several books, including Melville: The Making of the Poet, Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative, and Herman Melville: A Biography, a finalist in 1997 for the Pulitzer Prize.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Achelis & Bodman Foundation and The Poetry Foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

News Adopt This Book: Herman Melville: Complete Poems
April 11, 2023

Story of the Week Herman Melville, “Jimmy Rose”
August 1, 2022

Video YouTube reviewer extols the virtues of our Melville poetry volume: “This exists!”
May 14, 2020

Interviews LOA celebrates Herman Melville’s 200th birthday with his Complete Poems
September 23, 2019
Table of Contents

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War
The Portent
Misgivings
The Conflict of Convictions
Apathy and Enthusiasm
The March into Virginia
Lyon
Ball’s Bluff
Dupont’s Round Fight
The Stone Fleet
Donelson
The Cumberland
In the Turret
The Temeraire
A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Figh
Shiloh
The Battle for the Mississippi
Malvern Hill
The Victor of Antietam
Battle of Stone River, Tennessee
Running the Batteries
Stonewall Jackson
Stonewall Jackson (Ascribed to a Virginian)
Gettysburg
The House-top
Look-out Mountain
Chattanooga
The Armies of the Wilderness
On the Photograph of a Corps Commander
The Swamp Angel
The Battle for the Bay
Sheridan at Cedar Creek
In the Prison Pen
The College Colonel
The Eagle of the Blue
A Dirge for McPherson
At the Cannon’s Mouth
The March to the Sea
The Frenzy in the Wake
The Fall of Richmond
The Surrender at Appomattox
A Canticle
The Martyr
“The Coming Storm”
Rebel Color-bearers at Shiloh
The Muster
Aurora-Borealis
The Released Rebel Prisoner
A Grave near Petersburg, Virginia
“Formerly a Slave”
The Apparition
Magnanimity Baffled
On the Slain Collegians
America
Verses Descriptive and Memorial
   On the Home Guards who perished in the Defense of Lexington, Missouri
   Inscription for Graves at Pea Ridge, Arkansas
   The Fortitude of the North under the Disaster of the Second Manassas
   On the Men of Maine killed in the Victory of Baton Rouge, Louisiana
   An Epitaph
   Inscription for Marye’s Heights, Fredericksburg
   The Mound by the Lake
   On the Slain at Chickamauga
   An uninscribed Monument on one of the Battle-fields of the Wilderness
   On Sherman’s Men who fell in the Assault of Kenesaw Mountain, Georgia
   On the Grave of a young Cavalry Officer killed in the Valley of Virginia
   A Requiem for Soldiers lost in Ocean Transports
   On a natural Monument in a field of Georgia
   Commemorative of a Naval Victory
   Presentation to the Authorities, by Privates, of Colors captured in Battles ending in the Surrender of Lee
   The Returned Volunteer to his Rifle
The Scout toward Aldie
Lee in the Capitol
A Meditation
Notes
Supplement

Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land
Part One: Jerusalem
Part Two: The Wilderness
Part Three: Mar Saba
Part Four: Bethlehem

John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces
John Marr and Other Sailors
John Marr
Bridegroom Dick
Tom Deadlight
Jack Roy

Sea-Pieces
The Haglets
The Æolian Harp At the Surf Inn
To the Master of the Meteor
Far Off-Shore
The Man-of-War Hawk
The Figure-Head
The Good Craft Snow-Bird
Old Counsel Of the young Master Of a wrecked California clipper
The Tuft of Kelp
The Maldive Shark
To Ned
Crossing the Tropics
The Berg
The Enviable Isles

Pebbles

Timoleon Etc.
Timoleon
After the Pleasure Party
The Night-March
The Ravaged Villa
The Margrave’s Birth Night
Magian Wine
The Garden of Metrodorus
The New Zealot to the Sun
The Weaver
Lamia’s Song
In a Garret
Monody
Lone Founts
The Bench of Boors
The Enthusiast
Art
Buddha
C———’s Lament
Shelley’s Vision
Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century
The Marchioness of Brinvilliers
The Age of the Antonines
Herba Santa

Fruit of Travel Long Ago
Venice
In a Bye-Canal
Pisa’s Leaning Tower
In a Church of Padua
Milan Cathedral
Pausilippo
The Attic Landscape
The Same
The Parthenon
Greek Masonry
Greek Architecture
Off Cape Colonna
The Archipelag
Syra2
Disinterment of the Herme
The Apparition
In the Desert
The Great Pyramid

L’Envoy
The Return of the Sire de Nesle

Weeds and Wildings Chiefly: with A Rose or Two
Weed and Wildings
   Part I: The Year
   Part II; This, That and the Other
   Part III: Rip Van Winkle’s Lilac
A Rose or Two
   Part I: As They Fell
   Part II: The Rose Farmer
Appendix of Deleted Poems

Parthenope
House of the Tragic Poet
Preface
To M. de Grandvin
At the Hostelry
To Major John Gentian4
An Afternoon in Naples in the Time of Bomba

Uncollected Poetry and Prose-and-Verse

Maps to Clarel
Chronology
Note on the Texts
Notes
Index of Titles and First Lines

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