In a perfect world, Herman Melville’s genius as an author of both prose and poetry would have been recognized in his lifetime. Moby-Dick would have become the best-selling novel of the 19th century and Battle-Pieces and Aspects of War would today be routinely held up as the finest collection of poems about the Civil War ever written. Melville’s life was one of tragically ironic gut-punches, but the most ironic thing of all is probably what didn’t happen. Indeed, in a perfect world, Herman Melville would never have written a single word of the works that made him the definitive American writer.
Like his more famous prose about that white whale and poor Billy Budd, Melville’s poetry is about looking at the world around him, taking in all its conventions, traditions and expectations and responding with a shout: nope, not this writer! Melville was attacked because the mechanics of his verse didn’t conform to 19th century reader expectations of meter, rhyme and rhythm. Looked at in the context of today, one would hardly call Melville a radically revolutionary experimenter. His poems look conventional enough with their formal stanzas and punctuation. To simply look at a Melville poem is not to be confronted with a shock.
Poetry readers today wouldn’t think twice about a sonnet that substitutes iambic tetrameter for iambic pentameter. Or the addition of an extra two or three syllables that create a jarring obstruction to the rhythm. Of the expectation of a rhyme that never occurs. Today, such mechanical experimentation would be viewed—rightly so—with a big “so what!” Poetry was hot stuff in the 19th century and Americans like their verse precise. Worth keeping in mind is that when Melville was composing his verse, the most popular poet in American was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow is not a bad poet by any means, but he is to Melville’s poetry what Mark Twain is to Melville’s prose.
Longfellow’s poetry is wonderfully rhythmic to the point that it is easy to get lost and wind up sounding like a Dr. Seuss book if one isn’t on guard. The lightness of mechanics springs from what is primarily an optimistic worldview. Melville was anything but optimistic; his worldview is dark, questioning and verges on pessimism. Verges…but doesn’t get there because if he had ever slipped entirely into hopelessness he would not have kept writing after it became obvious his time in the spotlight was gone and he was on his way to utter obscurity.
In a perfect world, Melville’s early tremendous success would not have been killed forever by the negative reaction to Moby-Dick. But had that success continued, perhaps Melville would never have written masterpieces of metaphysical questioning like “The Berg.” If Melville had become the Charles Dickens of America, maybe the fertile imagination capable of creating the sophisticated yet simply presented allegory “The Maldive Shark” would never have developed. The collection of poems about the Civil War that make up Battle-Pieces reveal the mind of a man deeply troubled by the damage slavery inflicted upon the American character, but such emotional investment could only have come from a writer whose mind was not distracted by the trappings of fame and preservation of a reputation.
The world of critics and the fickleness of readers in the 19th century treated Herman Melville in a way that can only be termed shameful. The horrible irony is that had critics and readers who devoured his earliest novels been willing to follow him with open eyes into the much deeper and darker waters of Moby-Dick, there might not be any Melville poetry to read today. Melville turned to poetry in part because he no longer saw a viable need to commit to producing more novels. His later career is defined by completely overlooked, usually under-appreciated and often unpublished shorter works of prose and poetry. Even the one novel that did come late—Billy Budd—is not only categorized as a novella, but remained unfinished.
Readers have just one reason above all others to thank for having access to Melville’s poetry which even today remains not fully recognized as some of the best ever produced in America: it’s a beautifully imperfect world.
