Chapter 3 - Writings

Summary

Herman Melville created a rich and diverse body of work unparalleled in American literature. No single approach can plumb the depths of his writing, but a multifaceted approach may provide a way to begin understanding their complexities. Organized chronologically, this lengthy chapter is subdivided into twelve sections. Some discuss individual works. Others link multiple works together according to common themes.

Typee, the work that established Melville's reputation, gets its own section. Moby-Dick, Pierre, and Billy Budd, generally recognized as his three finest works, also receive sections of their own. Omoo, Battle-Pieces, and Clarel, Melville's three most neglected works, are treated separately in an effort to recognize writings that have never received their just desserts. Years ago Lewis Mumford called Omoo “the most underrated of Melville's books,” observing that it is typically “treated as if it were but the rinsings of the heady Typeean jug.” Mumford's comments still apply. Omoo has yet to get the attention it deserves. The discussion of it here attempts to remedy such neglect. College anthologies typically include a few selections from Battle-Pieces, but the poems that comprise Battle-Pieces deserve to be read in their entirety and in consecutive order to experience the book's tremendous power.

Few readers have the patience for Clarel. Writing fifty years after Melville published the poem, John Freeman observed, “Descriptive verse is no longer in vogue, and the cinema has usurped whatever place it retained until the twentieth century; and it is scarcely too much to say that, as to a large part of Clarel's purpose, it is fulfilled more admirably by the cinema.”