Herman Melville (1819-1891)
A superb biography of Melville is available at the University of Virginia's American Studies website. Click on the button below to read it.
Melville was the author of numerous Sea novels, in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper. These works, although oveshadowed today by Moby Dick, are quite solid examples of the developing American novel. Although Melville belongs to the Romanticism period and his works share many of the characteristics of the Romance, his works are early presentations of the novel. The website known as Melville.org, although abandoned in 2000, contains a number of active links and documents on the life, works, biographies, and criticisms of Melville and his works.
Melville was the author of numerous Sea novels, in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper. These works, although oveshadowed today by Moby Dick, are quite solid examples of the developing American novel. Although Melville belongs to the Romanticism period and his works share many of the characteristics of the Romance, his works are early presentations of the novel. The website known as Melville.org, although abandoned in 2000, contains a number of active links and documents on the life, works, biographies, and criticisms of Melville and his works.
Melville and the Civil War
For almost ten years he had published nothing. Then, according to its preface, "in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond," he composed the poetic sequence, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. It is chronological and inclusive, beginning with an elegantly controlled epilogue, "The Portent," on the hanging of John Brown, and ending with "A Meditation," an elegy urging compassion toward the vanquished in the name of the valorous dead of both sides. Melville has verses on almost every important event of the war, and he makes a point of including soldiers and sailors, blacks and whites, men and women, North and South. Some of them deserve to be counted among the best American poetry of the nineteenth century, for example, "A Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight," which is as much about the nature of war and problems of poetic language as it is a naval engagement, or "The Coming Storm," an occasional poem on Lincoln's death based on a landscape painting and the Shakespearean actor who owned it, but fundamentally about the tragic vision. Quite different from Whitman's Drum-Taps, it is the only comparable body of Civil War poetry.
Harper and Brothers published the cycle in August 1866 in an edition of 1,200 copies, of which only 486 were sold in the first year and a half. The reviews were not good, though Melville was praised in certain quarters for the position he took in a "Supplement" urging generosity toward the defeated South. In Battle-Pieces Melville, writing to please himself, seems to have hoped for a wider audience. This mistake he did not make again.
Source: Prof. Andreas Tauber, Department of Philosophy, Brandis University.
An interesting development has taken place in the last 20 years or so among literary scholars of Civil War era literature. Battle-Pieces is seen as the second best collection of Civil War poetry composed, surpassed only by Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Melville never returned to the popularity and acclaimed that he had achieved in his earlier "pot-boilers' novels Typee and Omoo.
For almost ten years he had published nothing. Then, according to its preface, "in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond," he composed the poetic sequence, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. It is chronological and inclusive, beginning with an elegantly controlled epilogue, "The Portent," on the hanging of John Brown, and ending with "A Meditation," an elegy urging compassion toward the vanquished in the name of the valorous dead of both sides. Melville has verses on almost every important event of the war, and he makes a point of including soldiers and sailors, blacks and whites, men and women, North and South. Some of them deserve to be counted among the best American poetry of the nineteenth century, for example, "A Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight," which is as much about the nature of war and problems of poetic language as it is a naval engagement, or "The Coming Storm," an occasional poem on Lincoln's death based on a landscape painting and the Shakespearean actor who owned it, but fundamentally about the tragic vision. Quite different from Whitman's Drum-Taps, it is the only comparable body of Civil War poetry.
Harper and Brothers published the cycle in August 1866 in an edition of 1,200 copies, of which only 486 were sold in the first year and a half. The reviews were not good, though Melville was praised in certain quarters for the position he took in a "Supplement" urging generosity toward the defeated South. In Battle-Pieces Melville, writing to please himself, seems to have hoped for a wider audience. This mistake he did not make again.
Source: Prof. Andreas Tauber, Department of Philosophy, Brandis University.
An interesting development has taken place in the last 20 years or so among literary scholars of Civil War era literature. Battle-Pieces is seen as the second best collection of Civil War poetry composed, surpassed only by Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Melville never returned to the popularity and acclaimed that he had achieved in his earlier "pot-boilers' novels Typee and Omoo.
