Clarel (1876)

Summary

Boston Evening Transcript, 10 June 1876.

From the press of G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, come two handsomely printed and bound volumes, entitled “Clarel; a Poem, and a Pilgrimage in the Holy Land,” by Herman Melville. Five Hundred and seventy consecutive pages of rhymed verse are rather apt to create a disgust for poetry if one is obliged to read them conscientiously and critically. Much as we should like to attack the two volumes in question, the heat of the season compels us to forego that pleasure. We can simply testify that we know Mr. Melville to be a man of talent, who has given the world several excellent novels, and whose chances for writing a readable poem of the above length are as good as those of any one else we know of.

New York Tribune, 16 June 1876.

After a long silence, Mr. Herman Melville speaks again to the world. No more a narrator of marvelous stories of tropical life and adventure, no more a weird and half-fascinating, half-provoking writer of romance, but now as a poet with a single work, in four parts, and about 17,000 lines in length. We know already that Mr. Melville's genius has a distinctly poetical side; we remember still his stirring lines on Sheridan's Ride, commencing:

Shoe the steed with silver,

That bore him to the fray!

But the present venture is no less hazardous than ambitious.