Colin Fleming Reviews New Herman Melville Poetry Collection

At the Washington Post, Fleming introduces readers to a new Library of America collection of Herman Melville's complete poetry and recommends picking it up to celebrate the author's 200th birthday. "You might think of picking up 'Moby-Dick,' but Melville," writes Fleming, "from the great metaphysical sea-spray of the beyond, might have a better recommendation. You see, this prose master considered himself a poet as much as anything." More from there: 

Melville’s career was riddled with sizable problems. One was that the work he deemed his best was the source of critical derision. Reviewers dug his travelogue-style novels such as “Typee,” but the more lyrical his prose became — like with the synapse-exploding “Pierre” — the less praise he received.

Melville wrote oceans of prose; the poetry didn’t lag far behind. Library of America will shortly be releasing a comprehensive 1,000-page collection of that poetry, and if all you know of this marine master is “Moby-Dick,” it’s high time to dip your toes in the lyrical swash.

Melville was a rhythmicist. Some writers have a better feel than others for when to break off a line, when to follow a torrent of words with a single-syllable hard-stop. This was clear even in “Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War” (1866), Melville’s first volume of poetry — 72 lyrical odes that put the smell of cannon fire and the sweat of stale uniforms in your nostrils, the buckle of bodies in your mind’s eye. “The Portent,” about the hanging of abolitionist John Brown, is the American letters version of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”: “Hidden in the cap/Is the anguish none can draw,” the poet intones, “But the streaming beard is shown/(Weird John Brown)/The meteor of the war.”

Read on at the Washington Post.