Melville

Call Me Ishmael (1947) is a book in name only. is rendered aural and haptic, a metaphor for manuscript and collage. That is why its sound and shape are so startling. As Olson says of Billy Budd: It finally has to do with the throat, SPEECH. And therefore, with the breath. In Projective Verse (1950), Olson argued that the projective poet starts down through the workings of his own throat to that place breath . . .has its beginnings, language possesses bodily resonance, drama has to come from, and all act springs (HU, 61); conversely, the non-projective poet is print bred' and, insofar as he stays where the ear and the mind are, is print-bound. Olson, who charts the history of verse as McLuhan the history of media, contends that Anglo-American poetry, with few exceptions, is non-projective from the post-Elizabethans to Ezra Pound, the methodology of whose Cantos points a way toward the redramatization of language (HU, 51, 61). Call Me Ishmael, a consummate instance of aurality and hapticity in modern literature, is a redramatization of language. For although it is (often brilliant) scholarship and criticism, it

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