Melville; or, the Ambiguous SELECTED POEMS OF HERMAN MELVILLE

Random Houses, 458 pp. $8.95.

THERE ARE MANY kinds of hyphenated poets-poet-novelists, poet-painters, poet-playwrights, poet-academics, poet-priests. Random House has decided to put two of them-both poet-novelists-together, and produce a hyphenated book of poetry-criticism. The idea is basically sound, since obviously a man who has worked in two literary fields will be best appreciated by another of his kind.

Herman Melville is best known for his fiction and mostly for two works, Billy Budd and Moby Dick. He was one of those artists who never find popular approval during their lifetime, and he died relatively anonymous. (The New York Time, in its short obituary, called him Henry Melville.) Like Hardy, he turned to poetry seriously after he had produced a sizeable amount of fiction, and alternated between the two for the rest of his life. His poetry bears the stamp of the novelist-his vocabulary is heavy, almost unreadable, slowed down by a nearly Vergilian concentration of m's, n's, and other weighty sounds.

Of course, it is easier to write poetry than it is to write fiction, but probably harder to write good poetry than to write good fiction. The effort involved in scribbling down a few lines of mediocre verse is minimal, far less than that required for even a very short story. The reader feels, at times, that Melville realized this, and let a metrical scheme and a lot of cheap rhymes do his work for him, Witness:

Spite-shell and round-shot, grape and canister, Up they climbed without rail or banister.... which sounds like a Thurber parody of bad Whittier.

But it is extremely difficult, if not fruitless, to criticize poetry a century after it is written. The modern reader can not have the correct appreciation for Melville's verse, because modern tastes have completely redefined what is acceptable in poetry. Tennyson, Longfellow, Byron, Shelley, all sound strange and forced to the car accustomed to Eliot or Pound. Melville really has to be accepted for what he is, and what his times were.

TO FIND OUT what Melville is, read Warren's introduction to this edition. Warren is a man who obviously has deep affection for Melville's poetry, perhaps too deep an affection, obscuring his ability to see its limitations. But the introductory essay, which is actually a book in itself, is a remarkably complete analysis of Melville, both as a person and as a poet. Warren explains, for instance, the factual details which inspired the creation of Billy Budd, and goes deeply into Melville's personal life, and his character. Unfortunately, when he is criticizing Melville's poetry, he tends to become bogged down, and also to lose his critical perspective.

Warren has done a brilliant job of exegesis, however. One learns from him, for example, that Melville sought to re-establish his failing literary career by making himself the poet of the Civil War. He failed, of course, but failed mostly because his convictions were too strong. He was not the hyperpatriotic hooster Whitman was. His philosophy of war was this:

Warred one for Right, and one for Wrong? So be it; but they both were young-Each grape to his cluster clung, All their elegies are sung. and this:

Our rival Roses warred for Sway-For Sway, but named the name of Right; And Passion, scorning pain and death, Lent sacred fervor to the fight.

The poetry is not of the very best, but the sentiment is clear, and strong. Perhaps it is a key to Melville's relative lack of popularity during his lifetime-his opposition to the most popular cause of the century.

Melville's career was incredibly uneven. The creator of Moby Dick was also the author of White-Jacket, Typee, Omoo, and Pierre; or the Ambiguities, and the poet of Battle-Pieces was also the poet of Clarel, an amazingly inept pseudo-epic on Biblical themes. Warren's edition of Melville is a priceless edition to Melville scholarship, for the continuity it brings to the author's work, the way it integrates his fiction and verse in a coherent outline. At Warren's hands, the ambiguous Melville begins to make sense.