John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces (1888)

Summary

New York Mail and Express, 20 November 1888.

The reputation of no American writer stood higher forty years ago than that of Herman Melville. Like his predecessor, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., he went to sea before the mast, starting, if we have not forgotten, from Nantucket or New Bedford on a whaler. Familiar from boyhood with such eminent writers of sea stories as Smollett and Marryat, he adventured into strange seas in “Omoo” and “Typee,” which were speedily followed by “Mardi,” a not very skillful allegory, and “Moby Dick,” which is probably his greatest work. He was the peer of Hawthorne in popular estimation, and was by many considered his superior. His later writings were not up to the same high level. With all his defects, however, Mr. Melville is a man of unquestionable talent, and of considerable genius. He is a poet also, but his verse is marked by the same untrained imagination which distinguishes his prose. He is the author of the second best cavalry poem in the English language, the first being Browning's “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.” His prose is characterized by a vein of true poetical feeling, as elemental as the objects to which it is directed. Nothing finer than his unrhymed poems exists outside of the sea lyrics of Campbell. The present text of these observations is to be found in the little volume, “John Marr, and Other Sailors,” of which only a limited edition is published, and which contains about twenty poems of varying degrees of merit, but all with the briny flavor that should belong to songs of the sea.