Melville : the making of the poet / Hershel Parker.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-223) and index.

Melville's lost books and the trajectory of his career as poet -- A poet in prose: how critics prepared Melville to think of himself as a poet -- Melville as hearer and reciter of poetry -- The omnipresence of poetry, 1820s-1848 -- The renewed power of poetry in Melville's life, 1849-1856 -- The status of poetry and the temptation of flunkeyism -- A nonpartisan becoming a poet during the Risorgimento -- Melville's progress as poet, 1857 to May 1860 -- Possible contents of poems (1860), -- On the meteor: Melville when he thought he was a published poet -- His verse still unpublished, Melville defines himself as poet, 1861-1862 -- Battle-pieces and aspects of the war: Melville's second volume of poems.

""Poetry was just a sideline with Melville; it was never important to him," pronounced Alfred Kazin, in a judgment frequently echoed by critics today. In this study, Hershel Parker shows that, on the contrary, Melville was enthralled by poetry for much of his life and wrote almost nothing else for a third of a century." "Parker demonstrates that from childhood Melville was steeped in British poetry from Spenser to Byron, including dozens of poets now little read even by specialists. In 1849 Melville's ecstatic study of Shakespeare renewed his love of poetry just as he was becoming a great prose writer. Rereading Milton and Spenser, he experienced them with such recharged intensity that he became passionately immersed in Wordsworth, Tennyson, the Brownings, and other modern poets as well. Parker explores the author's marginalia, much of it previously unknown, to elucidate Melville's shrewd, skeptical engagement with British poetry and with commentaries by poets, aestheticians, art historians, and the great Scottish reviewers." "Revealed here is an unknown Melville, the autodidact who made himself a poet and who brilliantly constructed a personal aesthetic credo. Dispelling baseless claims that Melville had a quarrel with fiction after Moby-Dick (or Pierre) and that he did not, in 1860, complete a book he called Poems, Parker offers new evidence of the full trajectory of Melville's career in all its glory and frustration."--Jacket.