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  • Published: 27 June 2006
  • ISBN: 9780143039037
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

Selected Poems (Melville, Herman)




While best known for such novels as his monumental Moby-Dick, Herman Melville was also an extraordinarily gifted poet. This is the most complete anthology of Melville’s poetry ever published in a single volume. It features a large selection from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, along with Melville’s own notes and prose supplement; cantos from all four books of Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land; selections from Melville’s later books, Timoleon, John Marr and Other Sailors, and Weeds and Wildings, Chiefly, with a Rose or Two; as well as a number of his powerful and lesserknown uncollected poems. This volume will usher in a new appreciation for Melville’s poetic gifts. Includes a new introduction to Melville's life and later career as a poet during the Civil War and Gilded Age, as well as notes and suggestions for further reading.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

  • Published: 27 June 2006
  • ISBN: 9780143039037
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

About the author

Herman Melville

Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819. When his father died, he was forced to leave school and find work. After passing through some minor clerical jobs, the eighteen-year-old young man shipped out to sea, first on a short cargo trip, then, at twenty-one, on a three-year South Sea whaling venture. From the experiences accumulated on this voyage would come the material for his early books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), as well as for such masterpieces as Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), The Piazza Tales (1856), and Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories (posthumous, 1924). Though the first two novels—popular romantic adventures—sold well, Melville's more serious writing failed to attract a large audience, perhaps because it attacked the current philosophy of transcendentalism and its espoused "self-reliance." (As he made clear in the savagely comic The Confidence Man (1857), Melville thought very little of Emersonian philosophy.) He spent his later years working as a customs inspector on the New York docks, writing only poems comprising Battle-Pieces (1866). He died in 1891, leaving Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories unpublished.

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