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Douglas Robillard, editor. The Poems of Herman Melville.-

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Douglas Robillard, editor. The Poems of Herman Melville. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2000. Revised edition. Pp. xii + 349.

In his substantial introduction to this welcome edition of Melville's poetry, Douglas Robillard recounts the personal and creative vicissitudes that inform Melville's poetic enterprise. Contrary to Professor Robillard's modest disclaimer that this Melville collection is "unlikely, perhaps, to help raise his reputation as a poet," the volume provides an illuminating introduction, historical and thematic notes, and an up-to-date bibliography to augment the complete texts of Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, John Marr and Other Sailors, Timoleon, Etc., and several complete cantos of Clarel.

Professor Robillard distinguishes between this collection (a revised edition of his Poems of Herman Melville (College and University Press Services, 1976)), and the volumes of selected poems edited by Robert Penn Warren and Hennig Cohen. Their excellent selections nonetheless fragment what Robillard correctly perceives as Melville's principle of construction in his three volumes of verse; editions of selected poems necessarily undercut the poet's design, his carefully constructed vision of each volume. The present collection's reintegration of the poems provides ready access to the poetic corpus published in Melville's lifetime. The editor notes the exception, Clarel, whose eighteen-thousand-line peregrination forecloses on complete reproduction. We are, however, compensated with substantial excerpts from three sections of the poem as pilgrimage: Part One: "Jerusalem," Cantos 29-33; Part Two: "The Wilderness," Cantos 29-35; and Part Four:. "Bethlehem," Cantos 10-16.

Robillard's 1976 edition did not include excerpts from Clarel, but did publish a selection of poems left in manuscript that he has chosen not to reprint in the revised edition. The intervening years proved instructive; Melville's manuscript poems had not reached final draft and conflicting reproductions have produced variant readings that underscore the poems' incompleteness. Professor Robillard offers a concise apologia:

The...

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