John Marr and Other Sailors

John Marr and Other Sailors is a volume of poetry published by Herman Melville in 1888. Melville published twenty-five copies at his own expense, indicating that they were intended for family and friends. Henry Chapin wrote in an introduction to a reprint that "Melville's loveable freshness of personality is everywhere in evidence, in the voice of a true poet".[1]

The "Inscription Epistolary" is to William Clark Russell, a British sea-story author who called Melville "the greatest genius the [United States] has produced" and "first" among the "poets of the deep".[2] Like Timoleon, his other volume of late verse, scholars have assumed that it was a "private work of art", symptomatic of his withdrawal from the literary world. Melville was putting this collection together as he was also drafting Billy Budd, which, like several poems in this collection, had prose headnotes followed by full poems.[3]

The poems

The poems include "John Marr", "Bridegroom Dick", "Tom Deadlight", "Jack Roy", "The Haglets", "The Æolian Harp", "To the Master of the 'Meteor'", "Far off-Shore", "The Man-of-War Hawk", "The Figure-Head", "The Good Craft 'Snow-Bird'", "Old Counsel", "The Tuft of Kelp", "The Maldive Shark", "To Ned", "Crossing the Tropics", "The Berg", "The Enviable Isles", and "Pebbles I-VII".

The critic F. O. Matthiessen finds an "oblique parable" to the bleakness of Melville's own later years in the title poem, "John Marr". In it, Marr, an old sailor, has left the "vastness of the sea for the vastness of the prairies". Melville's preface to the poem says that the pioneers there were "kindly", but "staid" and "sincerely, however narrowly, religious". They lacked "the free-and-easy tavern clubs ... in certain old and comfortable seaport towns", and were lacking "geniality, the flower of life springing from some sense of joy in it". But when Marr tried to enliven the occasion with a story of his adventures at sea, the blacksmith honestly said to him: "Friend, we know nothing of that here".[4]

gollark: > actual future planning by governments etc.Hilarious!
gollark: Fascinating.
gollark: ~~I expect incompetent governments would have been about equally incompetent, subject to random variation.~~ Actually, with this and level of trust in governments there are probably long-term complex things here I have no idea about.
gollark: Maybe contact tracing would have been somewhat better with 2029 technology; there seems to be a lot of work on position/thing sensing using mobile devices' radios and such now, and by then it would probably have matured. (Yes, this is overly specific, but things)
gollark: And remote work and associated tooling would probably be further along.

References
  • Dryden, Edgar A (1997). "John Marr and Other Sailors: Poetry as Private Utterance". Nineteenth-Century Literature. 52 (3): 326–349. doi:10.2307/2933998. JSTOR jstor.org/stable/2933998.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Giordano, Matthew (2007). "Public Privacy: Melville's Coterie Authorship in John Marr and Other Sailors". Leviathan. 9 (3): 65–78. doi:10.1111/j.1750-1849.2007.01198.x.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Matthiessen, F. O. (1941). American Renaissance; Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. London, New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199726882.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Melville, Herman (2009). Published Poems: The Writings of Herman Melville. edited by Robert C. Ryan and Hershel Parker. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 9780810111127.

Notes
  1. Chapin, Henry. Introduction John Marr & Other Poems. Kindle ebook ASIN B0084B7NOC
  2. Dryden (1997), p. 326.
  3. Giordano (2007), p. 65.
  4. Matthiessen (1941), p. 499.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.