Read more
Informationen zum Autor Hershel Parker , H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware, is the associate general editor of the Northwestern-Newberry The Writings of Herman Melville . His publications include Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons , Reading "Billy Budd" , and the 1995 edition of Melville's Pierre , or, The Ambiguities , illustrated by Maurice Sendak. He is also the author of the two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851 (1996) and Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851-1891 (2002), the first a Pulitzer finalist and each the winner of the highest award from the Association of American Publishers' Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division. Klappentext "Who would have looked for philosophy in whales, or for poetry in blubber?" the London John Bull remarked in October of 1851. And yet, the reviewer went on, "few books which professedly deal in metaphysics, or claim the parentage of the muses, contain as much true philosophy and as much genuine poetry as the tale of the Pequod 's whaling expedition." A decade and a half before surprising the world with a book of Civil war poetry, Melville was already confident of what was "poetic" in his prose. As Hershel Parker demonstrates in this book, Melville was steeped in poetry long before he called himself a poet. Zusammenfassung Gives an account of how one of America's greatest writers grew into the vocation of a poet. This work aims to correct two of the most pernicious misconceptions about Herman Melville perpetuated by earlier critics: that he repudiated fiction writing after Pierre! and that he hadn't begun writing poetry as early as 1860.
