Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | M | Melville Society Extracts

Jeanne C. Howes. Poet of a Morning: Herman Melville and the "Redburn" Poem.(Book Review)-

Article Excerpt
San Francisco: Cadmus Editions, 2001.

This is the story of a bizarre quest," writes Jeanne Chretien Howes in the Foreword to her tantalizing book Poet of a Morning: Herman Melville and the "Redburn" Poem. Sent "wondering and wandering on this long and fascinating adventure" by a footnote in Howard P. Vincent's Collected Poems of Herman Melville and Meade Minnigerode's mention of "a rare and anonymous poem ... whose hero resembled the young Melville," Howes embarked on a quest more heroic than bizarre. She undertook the prodigious task of determining whether the poem "Redburn: or the Schoolmaster of a Morning," published in 1845 by William M. Christy's Astor House publishing company was, in fact, Herman Melville's first published book.

Although Minnigerode and Vincent and early biographers Weaver and Mumford knew of the existence of the "Redburn" poem, they did not know that Melville had been a country schoolteacher before he went to sea, so they did not bother to locate the poem. When Jay Leyda and William Gilman published their work in the fifties, much more became known about Melville's early years. As Howes points out, the poem's protagonist bears a strong resemblance to the young Melville who taught at the Sykes District School not far from his Uncle Thomas' Pittsfield farm, and later at the East Greenbush and Schodack School in neighboring Rensselaer County. He shares Melville's idealism and his hatred of hypocrisy. It could be argued, however, that many young men had similar experiences teaching school.

When independent Melville scholar Jeanne Howes, author of a thesis on Melville's lyric poetry, read the poems, she was immediately struck...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!