Clarel

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Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land is an American epic poem by Herman Melville, published in two volumes in 1876. Clarel is the longest poem in American literature, stretching to almost 18,000 lines (longer even than European classics such as the Iliad, Aeneid and Paradise Lost). As well its great length, Clarel is notable for being the major work of Melville's later years; in the three decades between The Confidence Man (1857) and Billy Budd (completed circa 1891), Melville devoted himself solely to writing poetry, with Clarel and the short Civil-war collection Battle Pieces being his most significant achievements.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Origins 3 Form 4 Reception 5 References 6 See also

[edit] Plot

Clarel is a young student, who is on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In the opening Cantos, we find him sitting in the room of his hostel, suffering a crisis of faith. The poem follows Clarel as he travels a circular pilgrimage from Jerusalem, past the Dead Sea, the Mar Saba monastery, and Bethlehem. On his journey, he meets a variety of other individuals, who all represent various aspects of mid-19th Century attitudes to religion.

[edit] Origins

Melville had visited the Holy Land himself in the winter of 1856, when he had travelled by the same route that he describes in Clarel. The visit followed a trip to England on October of the same year, in which he met Nathaniel Hawthorne, and gave him the manuscript for what amounted to his 'farewell to prose,' The Confidence Man. Hawthorne later recorded his troubled impression of Melville on this occasion, noting how they

"took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in the hollow among the sand hills (sheltering ourselves from the high, cool wind) and smoked a cigar. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists -- and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before -- in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.".^[1]

In consulting the Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, Melville's record of the winter voyage of 1856 (which took him five months and 15,000 miles), it is clear that he was not relieved of either his doubts or his melancholy. Sailing through the Greek Islands, he became disillusioned by classical mythology, and this response was extended to his encounter with Jerusalem itself. Passing Cyprus, on the way home, he wrote: "From these waters rose Venus from the foam. Found it as hard to realize such a thing as to realize on Mt Olivet that from there Christ rose." (p. 164)

The poem thus shows Melville revisiting and exploring his realization that the Old World sites of religious pilgrimage are barren and meaningless objects in themselves. As he writes in the opening Canto:

Like the ice-bastions round the Pole,
Thy blank, blank towers, Jerusalem!

The modernist implication of these lines is striking, anticipating the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (who graduated from university the year the poem was published); the "Signifier" of Jerusalem is revealed as a "blank", with the "Signified" of the physical "towers" failing to contain any sacred meaning.

As well as this focus on the divide between the preternatural, the religious, and historical reality, Melville's poem is concerned with the crisis faced by mid-19th Century Christianity in the wake of the discoveries of Charles Darwin. Melville saw these scientific developments as simultaneously fascinating (cf. the focus on natural history in Moby Dick) and terrifying, representing a challenge to traditional Christianity that was almost apocalyptic in its significance, especially when combined with the more theological attacks of Protestantism. As he writes in the famously troubled, and inconclusive, Epilogue to the work:

If Luther's day expand to Darwin's year,
Should that exclude the hope -- foreclose the fear?

[edit] Form

The poem is composed in irregularly rhymed iambic tetrameter (except for the Epilogue), and contains 150 Cantos divided into four books: Jerusalem, The Wilderness, Mar Saba, and Bethlehem.

Trying to determine the strange appeal of the work's "detuned poetic style", William C. Spengeman has suggested that the "impacted tetrameters of Clarel" reveal the origin of the "modernist note", and that they thus anticipate the "prosody of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams".^[2]

Similarly, Walter E. Bezanson notes the "curious mixture of the archaic and the contemporary both in language and materials", leading to the inclusion of antique words such as "kern, scrip, carl, tilth and caitiff", alongside technical terms taken "from ship and factory, from the laboratory, from trading, seafaring, and war." Commenting on the rhyme-scheme and the restricted meter, Bezanson responded to the common objection that Melville ought to have composed the work in prose, or at least in blank verse, arguing:

To wish that Clarel had been written in blank verse, for example, is simply to wish for a completely different poem. In earlier years Melville had often set Shakespearean rhythms echoing through his high-keyed prose with extraordinary effect. But now the bravura mood was gone. Melville did not propose a broad heroic drama in the Elizabethan manner. Pentameter -- especially blank verse -- was too ample and overflowing for his present mood and theme. The tragedy of modern man, as Melville now viewed it, was one of constriction... Variations from the basic prosodic pattern are so infrequent as to keep the movement along an insistently narrow corridor.^[3]

[edit] Reception

Contemporary: The poem was barely noticed on its original publication, and the few reviews that did appear showed that mainstream critical taste in the States leant towards the polished, genteel lines of poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell. The New York Times was the first to insist that "it should have been written in prose," while the reviewer for the World complained that he had got "lost in the overwhelming tide of mediocrity." The Independent called it a "vast work... destitute of interest or metrical skill," and Lippincott's Magazine claimed that there were "not six lines of genuine poetry in it." In his collection of these quotes, Walter E. Bezanson suggests that the overwhelmingly negative response was partly due to the fact that none of the critics had "actually read it," noting in particular the Lippincott critic's baffling comment that the poet was evidently a "bright and genial" individual^[4], an observation entirely out of keeping with the tone of the vast majority of the work.

Early 20th Century: Subsequent criticism, especially since the so-called "Melville Revival" of the early-20s, has been kinder to the poem. Frank Jewett Mather called it the "America's best example of Victorian faith-doubt literature", and Raymond Weaver declared that it contained "more irony, vividness and intellect than almost all the contemporary poets put together." In 1924, amid the rising tide of literary modernism John Middleton Murray approvingly noted the "compressed and craggy" quality of Melville's poetic line, and the French critic Jean Simon called the work "an extraordinary revelation of a tormented soul."

Post-WW2: Seeing the whole work as an obscure elder sibling to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Richard Chase has argued that the "sterility of modern life is the central symbolic idea of the poem," and that after the "extremities of titanism in Pierre", Melville now reached the culmination of his later thought: "the core of the high Promethean hero." These remarks paved the way for a generation of critics who saw the poem as the crucial document of Melville's later years, such as Ronald Mason, who reads the poem as "a contemplative recapitulation of all Melville's imaginative life," and Newton Arvin, who calls it "Melville's great novel of ideas in verse."^[5]

In 1994, Harold Bloom chose Clarel as one of only four Melville works to be included in his Western Canon.^[6]

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• American Literature
• Epic poetry