Chapter Eight: "Possible Contents of Poems (1860)" (pages 135-143);
Chapter Nine: "On the Meteor: Melville When He Thought He Was a Published Poet" (pages 145-152);
Chapter Ten: "His Verse Still Unpublished, Melville Defines Himself as Poet, 1861-1862" (pages 153-187);
Chapter Eleven: "Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War: Melville's Second Volume of Poems" (pages 189-203);
"Epilogue" (pages 205-206);
"Notes" (pages 207-215);
"Works Cited" (pages 217-223);
"Index" (pages 225-238);
"About the Author" (page 239).
As you can see from the chapter titles, Parker does not single out Melville's 18,000-line 1876 centennial poem Clarel for concentrated attention in any one chapter. Rather, as the index shows (page 232), Parker discusses it in nineteen different places throughout the book. In addition, Parker discusses Clarel in considerable detail in the second volume of his biography of Melville (2002, pages 683-814). In Parker's "Epilogue" in his 2008 book, he says, "Despite my reticence, any careful reader of the chapters on Clarel in my [Melville] biography would conclude rightly that I rank it as the greatest long poem in American literature, unless one puts [Walt Whitman's] 'Song of Myself' in the same category. Melville wrestled strenuously, even nobly, with the angel, Art - and often won" (page 206).
I have discussed Melville's Clarel (1876) in the following three OEN articles:
(1) "July 4, 1776; July 4, 1876, July 4, 2020" (dated June 23, 2020): Click Here
(2) "Is Melville's 18,000-line 1876 centennial poem worth reading today?" (dated July 8, 2020): Click Here
(3) "Laurie Robertson-Lorant on Melville" (dated August 22, 2021): Click Here
Now, my favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) - the only Roman Catholic priest elected thus far to serve as the president of the Modern Language Association (in 1978). Ong established himself as a Renaissance specialist through his massively research doctoral dissertation on the history of the verbal arts (especially logic and rhetoric) in Western culture from Aristotle up to and beyond the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572). Ramist logic was central to the curriculum at Harvard College, founded in 1636, and at Cambridge University and elsewhere.
As a result, Ramist logic was a factor in the college-educated mind in seventeenth-century New England, as Harvard's Americanist Perry Miller shows in his massively researched 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press; see the "Index" for specific page references to Ramus and Ramist logic [page 528]). Simply stated, Ramist logic is part of the deep background of American Puritanism and the American Protestant tradition of thought up to Melville's time.
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