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Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a Great American Novel was established only in the 20th century, after the 1919 centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written". Its opening sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous.
The term Metaphysical poets was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterised by the inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse. These poets were not formally affiliated and few were highly regarded until 20th century attention established their importance.
Charles Olson was a second generation modernist American poet who was a link between earlier modernist figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the third generation modernist New American poets. The latter includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, and some of the artists and poets associated with the Beat generation and the San Francisco Renaissance.
Billy Budd, Sailor , also known as Billy Budd, Foretopman, is a novella by American writer Herman Melville, left unfinished at his death in 1891. Acclaimed by critics as a masterpiece when a hastily transcribed version was finally published in 1924, it quickly took its place as a classic second only to Moby-Dick among Melville's works. Billy Budd is a "handsome sailor" who strikes and inadvertently kills his false accuser, Master-at-arms John Claggart. The ship's Captain, Edward Vere, recognizes Billy's lack of intent, but claims that the law of mutiny requires him to sentence Billy to be hanged.
Francis Otto Matthiessen was an educator, scholar and literary critic influential in the fields of American literature and American studies. His best known work, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, celebrated the achievements of several 19th-century American authors and had a profound impact on a generation of scholars. It also established American Renaissance as the common term to refer to American literature of the mid-nineteenth century. Matthiessen was known for his support of liberal causes and progressive politics. His contributions to the Harvard University community have been memorialized in several ways, including an endowed visiting professorship.
Redburn: His First Voyage is the fourth book by the American writer Herman Melville, first published in London in 1849. The book is semi-autobiographical and recounts the adventures of a refined youth among coarse and brutal sailors and the seedier areas of Liverpool. Melville wrote Redburn in less than ten weeks. While one scholar describes it as "arguably his funniest work", scholar F. O. Matthiessen calls it "the most moving of its author's books before Moby-Dick".
Anne Killigrew (1660–1685) was an English poet and painter, described by contemporaries as "A Grace for beauty, and a Muse for wit." Born in London, she and her family were active in literary and court circles. Killigrew's poems were circulated in manuscript and collected and published posthumously in 1686 after she died from smallpox at age 25. They have been reprinted several times by modern scholars, most recently and thoroughly by Margaret J. M. Ezell.
Benito Cereno is a novella by Herman Melville, a fictionalized account about the revolt on a Spanish slave ship captained by Don Benito Cereno, first published in three installments in Putnam's Monthly in 1855. The tale, slightly revised, was included in his short story collection The Piazza Tales that appeared in May 1856. According to scholar Merton M. Sealts Jr., the story is "an oblique comment on those prevailing attitudes toward blacks and slavery in the United States that would ultimately precipitate civil war between North and South". The famous question of what had cast such a shadow upon Cereno was used by American author Ralph Ellison as an epigraph to his 1952 novel Invisible Man, excluding Cereno's answer, "The negro." Over time, Melville's story has been "increasingly recognized as among his greatest achievements".
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
"The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles", is a novella by American author Herman Melville. First published in Putnam's Magazine in 1854, it consists of eleven philosophical "Sketches" on the Galápagos Islands, then frequently known as the "Enchanted Islands" from the treacherous winds and currents around them. It was collected in The Piazza Tales in 1856. The Encantadas was a success with the critics and contains some of Melville's "most memorable prose".
Decasyllabic quatrain is a poetic form in which each stanza consists of four lines of ten syllables each, usually with a rhyme scheme of AABB or ABAB. Examples of the decasyllabic quatrain in heroic couplets appear in some of the earliest texts in the English language, as Geoffrey Chaucer created the heroic couplet and used it in The Canterbury Tales. The alternating form came to prominence in late 16th-century English poetry and became fashionable in the 17th century when it appeared in heroic poems by William Davenant and John Dryden. In the 18th century famous poets such as Thomas Gray continued to use the form in works such as "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". Shakespearean Sonnets, comprising 3 quatrains of iambic pentameter followed by a final couplet, as well as later poems in blank verse have displayed the various uses of the decasyllabic quatrain throughout the history of English Poetry.
The bibliography of Herman Melville includes magazine articles, book reviews, other occasional writings, and 15 books. Of these, seven books were published between 1846 and 1853, seven more between 1853 and 1891, and one in 1924. Melville was 26 when his first book was published, and his last book was not released until 33 years after his death. At the time of his death he was on the verge of completing the manuscript for his first novel in three decades, Billy Budd, and had accumulated several large folders of unpublished verse.
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is the first book of poetry of the American author Herman Melville. Published by Harper & Brothers of New York in 1866, the volume is dedicated "To the Memory of the Three Hundred Thousand Who in the War For the Maintenance of the Union Fell Devotedly Under the Flag of Their Fathers" and its 72 poems deal with the battles and personalities of the American Civil War and their aftermath. Also included are Notes and a Supplement in prose in which Melville sets forth his thoughts on how the Post-war Reconstruction should be carried out.
Raymond Melbourne Weaver was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in 1916–1948, and a literary scholar best known for publishing Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, the first full biography of American author Herman Melville (1819–1891) in 1921 and editing Melville's works. Weaver's scholarly credentials, training, and persuasiveness were important in launching the "Melville Revival" of the 1920s that brought Melville from obscurity to wide recognition.
Harrison Mosher Hayford was a scholar of American literature, most prominently of Herman Melville, a book-collector, and a textual editor. He taught at Northwestern University from 1942 until his retirement in 1986. He was a leading figure in the post-World War II generation of Melville scholars who mounted the Melville Revival. He was General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry The Writings of Herman Melville published by Northwestern University Press, which established reliable texts for all of Melville's works by using techniques of textual criticism.
Walter E. Bezanson was a scholar and critic of American literature best known for his studies of Herman Melville and contributions to the Melville revival that restored the writer to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s. Bezanson's research and editorial work rescued from neglect Mevlille's unappreciated epic poem, Clarel, and he published essays on Moby-Dick that were widely cited and reprinted.
References
- Dryden, Edgar A (1997). "John Marr and Other Sailors: Poetry as Private Utterance". Nineteenth-Century Literature. 52 (3): 326–349. doi:10.2307/2933998. JSTOR 2933998.
- Giordano, Matthew (2007). "Public Privacy: Melville's Coterie Authorship in John Marr and Other Sailors". Leviathan. 9 (3): 65–78. doi:10.1111/j.1750-1849.2007.01198.x. S2CID 145131873.
- Matthiessen, F. O. (1941). American Renaissance; Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. London, New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-972688-2.
- Melville, Herman (2009). Robert C. Ryan; Hershel Parker (eds.). Published Poems: The Writings of Herman Melville. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0-8101-1112-7.
