Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land

Whitman, Melville, and Political Theory

“…Or as Melville wrote in his poetic reflection on the "Dark Ages of Democracy" in Clarel (1876):What if the kings in Forty-eight Fled like the gods? Even as the gods Shall do, return they made; and sate, And fortified their strong abodes 8. …”

“…There is a tendency to heroize Melville as "more radical" than Emerson, Thoreau, and especially Whitman, who are "inscribed" (and flattened) as American exceptionalists (Frank,(7)(8). But what does "more radical" mean?…”

“Let no man deceive you by any means”

“…Describing a series of prints by Piranesi, which contain images of suffering, torture, and death, Melville asserts that far more disturbing and far more spellbinding are those images in the prints that depict inaccessible spaces. “These [depictions of spaces devoted to images of suffering and death] less of wizard influence lend / Than some allusive chambers closed” (Melville , 2.35.13–14). It is the “wizard influence” of the unknown spaces that truly terrify as they are impossible to discount as mere fantasy, the products of a perverse (“unclean”) mind; they resonate with something in the human heart, proof that the artist's “Imagination” has hinted at “Ideal truth”:

These wards of hush are not disposedIn gibe of goblin fantasy –Grimace – unclean diablery:They wings, Imagination, spanIdeal truth in fable's seat.

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“…As William H. Shurr writes, Melville here articulates “his own esthetic,” one that privileges “Imagination [as] the primary faculty by which the artist works” and which uses fable and mystery to produce “insights into the heart of reality” (Shurr , 114). And, not just the heat of reality, but into “man's heart,” which is “symbolized in these drawings, full of explicit horrors, with hidden recesses ‘allusive’ of even greater horror” (p. 114):

The thing implied is one with man,His penetralia of retreat –The heart, with labyrinths replete:In freaks of intimation seePaul's “mystery of inquity”Involved indeed, a blur of dream […] (Melville , 2.35.20–24)

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“…Melville himself hints at it here as he describes first the artist's hesitation to divulge the dark truth he aims to render and, then, the appropriate method to “read” that obscured truth:

As, awed by scruple and restrictedIn first design, or interdictedBy fate and warnings as might seem;The inventor miraged all the maze,Obscured it with prudential haze;Nor less, if subject unto question,The egg left, egg of the suggestion.Dwell on those etchings in the night,Those touches bitten in the steelBy aqua‐fortis, till ye feelThe Pauline text in gray of light;Turn hither then and read aright. (Melville , 2.35.26–37)

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