Melville and Clarel Introduction

Herman Melville is typically mostly known for his novel Moby-Dick, but the prose writer turned to poetry in his later years after his novels (following Moby-Dick) failed to be best-sellers. Poetry, it was thought, would be a creative outlet for him that would refresh his reading audience and spark new life into his readership and following. The attempt failed to produce much of anything in the way of literary recognition at the time. However, Melville produced the longest American epic poem ever written—Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), a work of 18,000 lines making it longer than Paradise Lost, the Iliad, or the Aeneid. The subject of Clarel is a metaphysical one, like so many of Melville’s works; even when rooted in a time and place with a specific conflict, plot and arc, his works tend to have a metaphysical backdrop that tells the story behind the story—the spiritual conflict inherent in the secular conflict. Melville’s own move away from prose to poetry indicates his inward turn towards the lofty (as though he could get any loftier after Moby-Dick, Israel Potter, Pierre, Bartleby the Scrivener, or Billy Budd). With Clarel, however, he united themes of pessimism that were evident in his earlier writings, such as Pierre and Bartleby (Stempel & Stillians, 1972; Tally, Jr., 2009) with themes of soulful entreaty and a desire to understand the mind of God. As Short (1979) noted just over a century after Melville’s Clarel was published, the poem represented Melville’s “spiritual quest for the meaning of existence” (p. 554). This paper will provide background and contextual information about Melville and how his life influenced his work. It will also provide a brief analysis of Clarel and show how it ties into the poet’s life, background, experience, politics, and sense of the spiritual.

Background

Melville was born in 1819 in New York City to a prominent well-to-do family. His grandfathers had both served nobly in the Revolutionary War and fought to secure the nation’s independence from England. The family lived beyond its means, though, and before long they were forced out of New York City to Albany where the expenses were less considerable (Parker, 1996). Melville was deeply influenced by ideas of nobility, honor, integrity, independence, and free will. Baptized as a baby into the South Reformed Dutch Church, Melville learned his Scripture and knew the Bible backwards and forwards—which he showed in Moby-Dick, as various Biblical themes and concepts are woven throughout the work from beginning to end. However, Melville was never satisfied with his religion and felt that there was something extraordinarily off-putting about the Protestant, Calvinist doctrines so prevalent in New England society. He struggled all his life to reconcile the message of Christ, or the Word of God, with the limitations of Calvinism. His journey to the Holy Land as an adult was conducted in part to provide him with a first-hand glimpse into the place where Christ had walked and talked and to see if he could, in any way, reconcile his pessimism with regard to Calvinism and his admiration for the Christian ideal (Flibbert, 1981).

Melville found success early...

Navy. His sea experiences were rich and full of adventure, but they also formed his inner life in a way that would later be manifested in his writings. As Milder (1988) points out, Melville’s time at sea likely resulted in a kind of spiritual estrangement that the author spent the rest of his life attempting to deal with. The major question on Melville’s mind was whether men had any real free will—and this was connected to his hatred of a God who could be so heartless as to create men simply to watch them suffer and spend eternity in damnation. However, his experiences did not empty him of spiritual belief. Instead, they molded him and turned him against the restrictiveness of the Calvinist doctrines. As Melville (1851) would later writer to the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, “I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head! I had rather be a fool with a heart, than Jupiter Olympus with his head. The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.” Melville rejected the idea that God created some to spend eternity in Paradise and others to go to Hell willy-nilly. He viewed God as having more heart than that—if He existed—and that the great struggle of human existence was deciding whether you in your own heart wished to move towards Him or away from Him. But simply understanding Him was the main challenge, first and foremost—and to understand Him, Melville wanted to go to the Holy Land.
Once he made himself known as a writer with his early adventure books based on his sea experience, Melville became more ambitious and began reflecting his spiritual and religious and social views in his writings. It began in earnest with Moby-Dick and continued on with Bartleby, The Confidence Man, Pierre and Billy Bud. When these works produced dwindling returns, Melville turned to writing poetry. By that time, America was on the verge of Civil War, and Melville captured the mood in his first book of poetry that came out following the conclusion of the war. Melville managed to visit the Holy Land in the meantime and it was based on that experience that he began composing the longest epic in American poetry—Clarel.

Melville’s politics were such that he identified with the cause of the Union during the American Civil War. His book of poems written during that time conveyed his respect for the fallen who gave their lives in defense of the Union. However, his politics were more completely seen in his sense of the union of mankind—a union that transcended nationalities: it was a spiritual union, but, as with the Civil War, there were battles to be fought as the members of the union of mankind often found cause for dispute and demonstrated a desire to break apart. This sense is evident in Clarel.

Clarel

Clarel is an ambitious work that centers on the title character, who is a young student of theology. Clarel has traveled to the Holy Land to see first-hand (like Melville himself) the land where Christ lived and died. He expects to find here some spirit that will animate…