Select Search
World Factbook
Roget's Int'l Thesaurus
Bartlett's Quotations
Respectfully Quoted
Fowler's King's English
Strunk's Style
Mencken's Language
Cambridge History
The King James Bible
Oxford Shakespeare
Gray's Anatomy
Farmer's Cookbook
Post's Etiquette
Brewer's Phrase & Fable
Bulfinch's Mythology
Frazer's Golden Bough
All Verse
Anthologies
Dickinson, E.
Eliot, T.S.
Frost, R.
Hopkins, G.M.
Keats, J.
Lawrence, D.H.
Masters, E.L.
Sandburg, C.
Sassoon, S.
Whitman, W.
Wordsworth, W.
Yeats, W.B.
All Nonfiction
Harvard Classics
American Essays
Einstein's Relativity
Grant, U.S.
Roosevelt, T.
Wells's History
Presidential Inaugurals
All Fiction
Shelf of Fiction
Ghost Stories
Short Stories
Shaw, G.B.
Stein, G.
Stevenson, R.L.
Wells, H.G.
Nonfiction
>
Carl Van Doren
>
The American Novel
>
Subject Index
> Page 75
PREVIOUS
NEXT
CONTENTS
·
BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
·
SUBJECT INDEX
Carl Van Doren
(18851950).
The American Novel.
1921.
Page 75
author.
Pierre
(1852) is hopelessly frantic, the work of a mad Meredith raving over moral ambiguities;
Israel Potter
(1855), a Revolutionary story, is not markedly original; neither are
The Piazza Tales
(1856) and
The Confidence Man
(1857). The verses which Melville wrote in his later years, his sole output, are in a few instances happy and resonant, but more often jagged and harsh. Whatever the cause of his loss of power, he fretted under it and grew more and more metaphysical, tortured, according to Hawthorne, by uncertainty as to a future life, and by his own words shown to have despaired of any future for his writings. The way of metaphysics, for Melville, was madness; his earlier works might have taught him that he was lost without a solid basis of fact; in himself he lacked discipline and form. He moved restlessly about, living now in New York, now in a farmhouse near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, now in New York again, marrying in 1847, lecturing on the South Seas during the years 185760 in many cities of the United States and Canada, and visiting Europe and Palestine, about which he wrote a poem
Clarel
(1876)two volumes long and a rival of
Mardi
in eccentricity. Finally, he was appointed to a place in the New York Custom House in 1866 and served there for twenty years, living a private life of almost entire, though voluntary and studious, seclusion, musing on the philosophies. How many, he had said in
Moby Dick
of Tashtegos fall into the whales head, have likewise fallen into Platos honey head, and sweetly perished there? Melvilles death in 1891 removed from American literature one of its most promising and yet most disappointing
CONTENTS
·
BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
·
SUBJECT INDEX
PREVIOUS
NEXT
Shakespeare
·
Bible
·
Strunk
·
Anatomy
·
Nonfiction
·
Quotations
·
Reference
·
Fiction
·
Poetry
©
19932015
Bartleby.com
· [
Top 150
] ·
Subjects
·
Titles
·
Authors
·
World Lit
.