Form as Vision in Herman Melville's Clarel

Abstract

N HIS FOREWORD to Vincent Kenny's book on Clarel, Gay Wilson Allen recommends three for approaching the poem. The first relates Clarel to Melville's spiritual quest for the meaning of existence. The second reaches Clarel by way of Melville's actual trip to Palestine. The third explores Melville's anticipation of the pessimism so important to later thought.1 Efforts by such recent critics as Kenny and William H. Shurr, not to mention all whose contributions Kenny summarizes in his fourth chapter, have moved us far enough along these routes that another can be glimpsed.2 Clarel demands a reading in the light of relationships between Melville's poetic technique and modifications which the practice of verse wrought in his view of literature. A reverence for organic unity pervaded Romantic poetics in America;3 Melville's changing interpretation of this doctrine determines the adapting of versification to narrative purpose which gives Clarel its unique shape. Such a study promises a better understanding of how Melville's later verse grew out of the impatient questing of the novels, an explanation of his curious abandonment of tetrameter in the Clarel epilogue, and a more flattering image of his state of mind than has been current. The protean nature of Melville's poetry suggests that the promise of artistic rather than philosophical accomplishment motivated the varied forms of his mature works. Although his themes reflect the depression which adorns his family correspondence, his incessant technical experiments bespeak an undying vitality. Our view of Melville should include the literary interests, both practical and theoretical, which kept him active at his desk in spite of obscurity, money problems, family tragedy, poor health, and civil service. Clarel, with