The antithetical poetics of Herman Melville: The shorter published poems

Juana Celia C Djelal, Purdue University

Abstract

Herman Melville's poetry was rejected by a readership that demanded a countenanced rhyme and meter, predictable form, imagery and metaphor. The repulse ensured his continued antithetical response to the condition of the country, as well as to expectations for poetic discourse. Dispossession, his long travels abroad, and civil war all precipitated Melville's engagement with themes of separation and dis/memberment. Technically, the poetry confronts matters of division and reintegration by means of three recurring tropes. These are the devices known as tmesis, chiasmus, and catachresis. These rhetorical conceits apply both to individual poems and specific pairings. For example, "Billy in the Darbies" and "Crossing the Tropics," discussed in separate chapters, are both addressed in terms of reversal and dislocation, are thematically chiastic in their temporal-spatial arrangements. Catachresis is the dominant trope for the discussion of war's dissonant, cataclysmic inversion of integrity. Tmesis, the trope of self-interruption or division, figures both in the discussion of the war poems, and the reading of "After the Pleasure Party." This study also focuses on certain topical and thematic issues. In this vein, I pursue Melville's grappling with the tragedies that democracy creates: the unreconciled oppositional mode of Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, which sees the victims of war as pieces of the battle, fragments and remnants of the cataclysm. The poems in John Marr and Other Sailors With Some Sea-Pieces (1888) commemorate the dead and nearly-forgotten. I take mimesis, in this context as Melville's means of reconciling discrete elements key to his representation of natural rhythm. Isolation essential to creative endeavor is central to my discussion of Melville's last published volume, Timoleon Etc. (1891). In his desire to comprehend the nature of loneness, he turns to biblical and classical motifs. These motifs occupy the ground on which Melville chooses to encounter a portion of the past relevant to the poetic process and the predicament of the artist.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Oreovicz, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature

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