Melville's Reading of Arnold's Poetry

Bezanson, Walter E.

doi:10.2307/460065

Cited by 5 publications

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“…(Brodhead's phrasing in the passage quoted from his review may seem to imply that he had worked out for himself the likelihood that writing the lost The Isle of the Cross would have affected "Bartleby the Scrivener" and later writings, but his point is taken from Parker, Herman Melville 30 In 1954 Walter E. Bezanson saw a "contraction" of "creative powers" in the fact that "between 1846 and 1857 Melville had published ten books" and in the five years between 1857 and 1862 had published none. 31 Bezanson could not have known for certain about yet another prose work in those extraordinarily creative ten years, The Isle of the Cross (Melville's eighth book, if it had been published), but he could have mentioned Poems (1860) as witness that it was Melville's publishing outlets that had contracted, rather than Melville's creative powers. Criticism cannot be fully valid if it ignores or denies the actuality of the lost Poems or if it simply fails to visualize the book as something that ever existed.…”

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confidence: 95%

The Isle of the Cross and Poems: Lost Melville Books and the Indefinite Afterlife of Error

Parker

2007

Nineteenth-Century Literature

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Reviewers of Hershel Parker's Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851––1891 in the New York Times and other influential papers expressed disbelief that The Isle of the Cross and Poems (1860) had ever existed. In fact, Melville scholars had known much about The Isle of the Cross (but not the name) for decades and since 1922 had known almost everything about Poems. Like these reviewers, many other modern critics no longer perform archival research themselves and fail to acknowledge decades of basic documentary work done on Melville. It is as if critics believe nothing new could have been discovered after 1921, the year of Raymond Weaver's biography of Melville. The consequence of this ignorance, manifest in much literary criticism, is a pernicious distortion of the trajectory of Melville's whole literary career.

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The Isle of the Cross and Poems: Lost Melville Books and the Indefinite Afterlife of Error

Parker

2007

Nineteenth-Century Literature

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“…Derwent simply “errs” or “overstates” because “pulpiteers” such as he “find / (For sciolists abound) a kind / And favoring audience” (NN Clarel 3.16.185‐96). Melville marked the following lines in Arnold's“The Grand Chartreuse”: “My melancholy, sciolists say, / Is a pass’d mode, an outworn theme—/ As if the world had ever had / A faith, or sciolists been sad!” (Bezanson, “Melville's Reading” 388). One wonders if such a comment contributed to the characterization of the perennial optimist Derwent, who had a “gift / For light disposings: so to skim!” (NN Clarel 2.21.116‐17).…”

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confidence: 99%