Melville's Clarel

Of all Melville's major writings Claret 2 has suffered most from undeserved oblivion and casual plunderings. Until recently only the most partisan of Melville's admirers have been willing to endure the rigors of a four-part poem of 150 cantos that runs to some 20,000 lines. An age little given to the reading of narrative poetry has lived easily with the notion that Claret neither invokes obligation nor promises rewards. The poem has been assumed to be too complex and discursive, overly private in reference and symbol, and above all, interminably long. Under the consoling belief that Clarel was anyhow the late flickering of a waned imagination and that poetry was a left-handed venture for Melville, the poem lay until the 1940's where the critics had dropped it in the summer of 1876among the cold ashes of a presumably superannuated talent. More recently a series of book-length studies of Melville's life and thought-books by Simon, Sedgwick, Stone, Chase, Arvin, Mason, and Howard (plus an essay by Wells) -have begun the commentary which the poem has long needed. The weaker elements of this criticism include an inevitable sense of the anticlimactic tone of Melville's later years, hasty reading of the poem, simultaneous treatment of Melville's Mediterranean journey of 1856-57 and the poem, and a biographer's impatience to extract a thesis. Thus we are more likely to get a version of what Melville thought about science, democracy, religion, and war than a realization of the values of the poem. A more useful segment of this criticism has been char

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