21L.705 Class Home

21L.705 Major Authors: Melville the Poet

Fall 2011

image restricted to class participants

Herman Melville, from portrait by Joseph Oriel Eaton. From the Melville Society site: http://melvillesociety.org/

Instructor: Wyn Kelley

Lecture: MW 1-2:30 (66-148)

Information:

Perhaps best known as America’s great novelist and writer of the sea, Herman Melville (1819-91) was also reading, considering, and writing poetry from early in his career. After just over a decade of producing novels and short stories (1846-57), he turned to poetry for the remaining thirty-odd years of his life. Understanding Melville the poet may begin with his lyrical masterpiece in prose, Moby-Dick (1851)—a trove of rhetorical virtuosity and a dazzling tribute to the poets he loved. Looking at some of Melville’s short stories as revealing his developing literary aesthetic, we move to his poetic works—a Civil War volume Battle-Pieces (1866), selections from his long narrative poem Clarel (1876), the published collections John Marr, and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon, Etc. (1891), and the unpublished collection Weeds and Wildings, Chiefly: With a Rose or Two. We conclude with Billy Budd, Melville’s final, unpublished work and one that began as a poem and found its way back to prose fiction. This seminar offers a full reading of the Melville we know and also of one not so familiar—the hybrid, fluid, and innovative poet who has not been sufficiently recognized.

Announcements

Melville's Thoughts on the Poetry of MOBY-DICK

“It will be a strange sort of book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;--& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.” Letter to Richard Henry Dana, May 1, 1850.

And a further note: We do not have a projector in 66-148, so I have not been able to show you the Stellar site for this class. But do browse it over the weekend, if you haven't already. You will find the Brett Zimmerman article mentioned in the syllabus and can take a look at it before class. The projector will be installed 9/21 and will be available for your in-class reports. Enjoy this sunny weekend!

Announced on 10 September 2011 11:30 a.m. by Wyn Kelley