53.

THE NOVEL, SHORT STORY AND POETRY IN THE EEUU:

MELVILLE, POE AND WHITMAN

I am going to divide this topic into four different sections. First of all, I will

include a brief historical background of the time in which Melville, Poe and

Whitman wrote. After that, in every of my next three sections I will deal with one

of three authors related to three literary sub-headings: the novel, the short story

and poetry. These authors are H. Melville, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman.

Although the writers cannot be categorised as having exclusively written only

one of these 3 genres, it is true to say that Melville is best known for his novels;

Poe for his short stories and Whitman for his poetry.

Firstly, I will take a look at the historical background. Melville, Poe and

Whitman were born in the early 19th century. They were contemporaries of other

great American writers such as Hawthorne and Emerson. The 1830s was an

age often referred to as the “American Renaissance”, an age of optimism in

the U.S. In the 1830s and 1840s, the frontier of American society was quickly

moving toward the west. Writers were beginning to look at the western frontier

for ideas for a literature about American life. But in the cities along the east

coast, the older ideal of a nation as an Atlantic community was still very much

alive. There was a feeling that the cultures of Massachusetts and Virginia ought

to be the models of national culture.

At this time, Boston and its neighbouring towns and villages were filled

with intellectual excitement and activity. Among the younger people, there was

1
much talk about the “new spiritual era”. The young intellectuals of Boston were

dissatisfied with the old patriotism. America’s power and wealth did not interest

them. They wanted to explore the inner life. They studied the Greek, German

and Indian philosophers. Many kept diaries about their lives and feelings.

Others became vegetarian or nudists.

In the centre of this activity were the Transcendentalist. They formed a

movement of feelings and beliefs rather than a system of philosophy. They

rejected both the conservative Puritanism of their ancestors and the newer

liberal faith of Unitarianism, a branch of Christian church that does not believe in

the Trinity. They saw religion as “negative, cold, lifeless”. Although they

respected Christ for the wisdom of his teachings, they thought of the works of

Shakespeare and the great philosophers as equally important. The

Transcendentalist tried to find the truth through feeling and intuition rather than

through logic. They found God everywhere, in man and in nature. In many

ways, nature itself was their “Bible”.

It is in this historical and cultural context that we find the three writers I

am going to deal with. Let’s start with Melville.

Herman Melville (1819-1891), although a novelist, short story writer and

poet, is best known for his novels, particularly his sea-faring tales such as the

most famous one, Moby-Dick. Since the 1920s he has been “rediscovered” and

considered as one of America’s finest writers, a standing he did not enjoy during

his lifetime. From his adventure tales that won him immediate success and a

2
wide readership, his popularity began to decline with the publication of Moby-

Dick as his complex themes and elaborate prose alienated readers.

As for his life, born in 1819 to a family of English and Dutch ancestry,

Melville was raised in an atmosphere of financial instability, worsening with the

death of his father. He attempted to help support his family, working in various

jobs. However, the bankruptcy of the family business forced him into a life at

sea. Melville’s most important experiences in life started when he became a

sailor at age twenty. On board ship, he was deeply shocked by the life of the

low class sailors. Their personal morality was completely different from anything

his family had taught him. But when he began to write, life at sea became the

most important material for his books and short stories. In Melville’s fiction, man

lives in a world divided into two warring parts: good against evil, God against

Satan, the “head” against the “heart”. There is no way to overcome these

opposites. Melville has a tragic view of life: he seems to feel that the universe

itself is working against human happiness and peace of mind.

Melville’s stories were always more than simple sea adventures. In a

sense, the voyages of his heroes are always searches for the truth. His fist

novel, Typee, was quite popular because of its realistic detail. The hero

escapes from his ship and lives among a tribe of cannibals, the Typee. He finds

them happy, morally poor and “better than the Europeans”. But they do kill and

eat other human beings. The book raises the question of whether happiness is

always united with morality. Typically, Melville leaves the question unanswered.

Ommo continues the adventures of Tom, the hero of Typee. Both novels

contrast civilization with primitive life. On a deeper level they show the clash

between the values of Christianity and those of the tribal religions.

3
 Mardi was too abstract and difficult to be popular. It deals with a sea

voyage which is no longer real, but allegorical. The hero visits various islands

representing various countries of the world. One of the countries symbolized the

United States and is criticized because it rejects the past too easily and thinks

that its own civilization will last forever.

Redburn deals with a young man’s first experiences as a sailor. Its theme

–how people are drawn into evil- is a major theme in American literature. It is a

deeply humanitarian novel, emphasizing that people do not belong to just one

nation, but to all of humanity.

Writing all these novels helped prepare Melville for Moby Dick (1851),

perhaps the greatest novel of American literature. The novel can be read at

various levels. Simplistically it is the adventure of the pursuit of the white whale

by Captain Ahab, although on another level, it can also be read as an allegory

of the whole human condition. From the beginning, it is clear that the voyage of

the whaling ship Pequod will be a symbolic voyage and that Moby-Dick, the

great white whale, represents God or fate, although Melville gives the reader a

great deal of factual information about whale-hunting in order to make the world

of this book seem real. Captain Ahab, the central character, is torn between his

humanity and his desire to destroy the white whale. These two sides –the light

and the dark –fight each other in Ahab although the dark side wins. To him,

Moby-Dick is part of a “universal mystery” which he hates because he cannot

understand it. When he finds the whale and attacks him, the ship is destroyed.

Ahab himself is pulled down into the sea to his death. Melville seems to be

4
saying that personal identity is only an illusion. Moby Dick is a tragic novel. It is

interesting to point out that his protagonist, Captain Ahab has been said to be

reminiscent of King Lear in his search for justice and of Oedipus in his search

for the truth.

Unfortunately the public did not like Moby Dick. It was many years before

the genius of its author was recognised. After Moby Dick, Melville wrote Pierre

and The Confidence-Man, which were also unpopular. From that moment, his

themes became less ambitious and his style more humorous and

conversational, but his philosophy never changed.

Now, let’s take a look at Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). It is interesting

that his life and personality have attracted almost as much attention as his

writings. He is the master of Gothic horror, with tales such as The Fall of the

House of Usher. He has also been credited as creating the detective story and

The Murderers in the Rue Morgue (1841) has been called the first of the genre.

His influence as a writer has been significant and he made important

contributions to American literature in three areas: the short story, literary

criticism and poetry. However, although he is now assessed as one of

America’s best writers of the first half of the 19th century, like Melville, his genius

was not fully recognised or appreciated in his own lifetime perhaps because his

greatest misfortune was that he was born before his time.

Learning about Poe’s disappointments and personal setbacks is

essential to understand his literature and what lies behind it. Edgar Allan Poe

was born in Boston in 1809, the son of professional actors. The death of his

5
mother and his father’s disappearance led him to be cared for by John Allan, a

merchant from Virginia, more inclined to punish than to understand him so the

relationship with him was quite difficult. He began writing poetry but he soon

turned to prose and criticism. However, it was as writer of short stories,

particularly the macabre and the detective ones, that he got fame. 1845 was

probably the most significant period in Poe’s life, and the year when his poem

The Raven appeared. Following the death of his wife, his decadent lifestyle

resulted in a series of flirtations with various women, an attempted suicide,

drug-addiction and attacks of delirium tremens. In fact, he was picked up

unconscious in a dark street in Baltimore and died 3 days later in 1849.

Poe was another writer interested in psychology and the darker side of

human nature. His fiction belongs to the Southern, rather than to the New

England, tradition. It is far more romantic in language and in imagery. One of his

first short stories was “MS Found in a Bottle” (1833). The theme of this strange

sea story was used in many later stories: a lonely adventurer meets with

physical and psychological horrors while is moved towards a state of insanity. It

is interesting to point out that, with this story, Poe won a first prize consisting of

50 dollars which probably did not release him from his life of poverty!

Many of Poe’s tales of horror are known throughout the world. His

method was to put his characters into unusual situations. Next, he would

carefully describe their feelings of terror and guilt. The greatest examples of this

kind of stories are The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart and The

Black Car. The author here rarely shows the actual object of horror. Rather, the

reader must use his imagination.

6
 “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) is the best known of Poe’s tales.

It is a successful example of his theory that in short stories, “unity of effect is

everything”. Taking into account this unity of effect, he wrote his tale according

to a carefully planned psychological method. The story’s setting and symbols

reveal the character of the hero and Poe explores Roderick’s tormented state of

mind. A crack in the house symbolizes the relationship between the adult twins,

Roderick and Madeline Usher. When Roderick buries his twin sister before she

is really dead, she returns to the house from the grave. His heroines often

“return from the grave” by various means. When Roderick dies, the house sinks

into the black lake surrounding it. The influence of the British Romantics can be

seen in the complex tale, and the song Usher sings for his guest “The Haunted

Palace” has been said to have echoes of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Poe merged

reason and madness and combined an eerie atmosphere with everyday reality

to create a psychological symbolism that gives his tales a haunting credibility.

Many films have been made of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the first in

1928, where filmmakers made use of experimental techniques in an attempt to

capture the elusive mystery of the story as well as the unreal, dreamlike setting

of the house.

It is not only the events that take place in his tales that are terrifying but

also the fact that his characters do not always have a motive for their crimes. All

of Poe’s murderers are obsessive to some extent, and even in tales such as

“The Black Cat”, where the murder is impulsive rather than premeditated, there

is little clue as to the exact state of mind that drives the person to commit the

crime.

7
 The best of Poe’s work demands to be taken symbolically and his aim

was to break away from the conventional frontiers of consciousness. In his

works, there was always a quest for Beauty and a search for what he called “the

terror of the soul”. There is a reoccurring image in Poe: a voyage of the mind

ends with knowledge, revelation and inevitably destruction.

Poe was also one of the creators of the modern detective story. Instead

of examining characters and feelings, these stories examine mysteries or

problems. Examples include The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of

Marie Rogêt, The Purloined Letter and The Gold Bug. Except for the last of

these, each of the stories has the same hero, the brilliant French detective

Monsieur Dupin. This character is one of Poe’s finest creations. The author

shows us how Dupin’s brilliant mind works. The not very intelligent narrator

seems to be as confused by the complicated plot as the reader and this makes

Dupin’s genius seem even greater. In many ways, such a narrator reminds

Doctor Watson, Sherlock Holmes’s friend, who narrates the tales about the

great detective. Poe’s writings influenced many writers, including Baudelaire

and Arthur Conan Doyle. In fact, it is said that Sherlock Holmes is an upright

version of Poe’s Dupin. His detective stories are written in a simple, realistic

style. Perhaps this is why they were more popular during his lifetime than his

tales of horror.

To conclude, I would like to take a brief look at Poe’s poetry. Poe was

interested in its sound, rather than in its content. He constantly experimented

with ways to make it musical, even using names that have a musical sound

8
such as Annabel Lee. In The Raven (1845), one of the best-known poems in

American literature, the rhythm allows us to hear the bird’s beak hitting the door.

19th century America mostly ignored –or tried to ignore- the importance of

Edgar Alan Poe. Americans at the time were very patriotic and they often felt his

art was too “foreign”. They simply could not understand the excitement he

caused in France. However, after his death Poe became an influential figure.

His works have influenced later writers and have been used as a source of

inspiration for different arts. Painters such as Manet composed illustrations for

his works. Film-makers have often used Poe’s works. Hitchcock once declared

that he began making suspense films because he liked Poe. The heavy metal

band Iron Maiden recorded a song called “Murders in the Rue Morgue”. Many

other pop singers, actors and film-makers have been caught by Poe’s attractive.

Finally, I will deal with Walt Whitman (1819-92). Poet, journalist and

essayist, his verse collection, Leaves of Grass is considered a landmark in the

history of American literature. The well-known portrait of Whitman in his hat and

open necked shirt that appeared on the front cover of the first edition of this

collection is representative of his subject matter: America and Americans,

celebrating the “ordinary” American man with traditional values, from

ploughmen to builders.

As far as his life is concerned, he was born in 1819 in a family of English

and Dutch origins. Poverty characterised his childhood. Most of his education

came from early jobs in printing shops and newspapers rather than from

schools. He worked as printer, teacher, journalist or editor and published many

9
of his poems in newspapers. At a time when most young Americans were

working hard to rise in the world, Whitman seemed a rather lazy youth. He took

long walks in the country and by the seashore.

Throughout his work, Whitman maintains a joyous curiosity about almost

every detail of life. Often his poems contain lists of sights and objects any

nineteenth-century American could recognize. His two favourite words are

“sing” and “absorb”. First he “absorbs” the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of

the world around him, and then he “sings” them out in poetry.

Leaves of Grass was Whitman’s life work. This collection of poetry is

now considered a milestone in American literary history. It was a collection that

he was to expand and refine throughout many editions, the work growing from

its original 12 untitled poems and a preface to a collection of over 400 pages by

1891-92. He called it “a passageway to something rather than a thing in itself

concluded”. He saw reality as a continuous flow, without a beginning or end. He

disliked the stiffness and “completeness” of 19 th century poetic forms.

Therefore, from 1855 until his last revisions in 1892, Leaves of Grass remained

an incomplete “work-in-progress”. One of the earliest inclusions was his

important Song of Myself. This extremely long poem announces all of the major

themes of Whitman’s work. In his first lines, he begins with himself: “I celebrate

myself and sing myself”. But this “self” soon grows to include friends, the entire

nation and, finally, humanity. He then introduces himself as “Walt Whitman, a

Cosmos”. To him, the real “self” includes everything in the universe. “Nothing,

not God, is greater than the self is”. This is a Transcendentalist idea of “self”.

10
 Whitman brings sex within the area of poetry. He announces, “I am the

poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul”. This development shocked

most nineteenth-century Americans. Many were embarrassed and angered

about the two groups of poems about sex –Children of Adam and Calamus-

which he included in the third edition of Leaves of Grass. In fact, Whitman was

actually dismissed from his clerkship at the Department of the Interior in

Washington in 1873 when his superior discovered that he was the author of the

“indecent” work Leaves of Grass.

Like Poe, Whitman was influenced by the Romantic Movement. Echoing

romantics such as Wordsworth, he believed poetry to be a form of knowledge,

the wisdom of mankind. One of the most recurrent themes in his poems is the

power of nature to regenerate the soul and his poems are filled with a religious

faith. His faith in the processes of life includes themes such as fertility, sex, the

maternal ocean and the stars.

One of Whitman’s most important developments was in the area of

poetic form. Through him, American poets finally freed themselves from the old

English traditions. He invented a completely new and completely American form

of poetic expression. To him, message was always more important than form,

and he was the first to explore fully the possibilities of free verse. In his poetry,

the lines are not usually organized into stanzas; they look more like ordinary

sentences. Although he rarely uses rhyme or meter, it can still be heard or felt a

clear rhythm thanks to the use of anaphora, the repetition of sounds and words,

patterns of stress and pause… This, along with the content, gives unity to his

poetry.

11
 Whitman wrote in a plain style, so that ordinary people could read him.

He strongly believed that Americans had a special role to play in the future of

mankind. Although he often disapproved of American society, he was sure that

the success of American democracy was the key to the future happiness of

mankind.

There was an event which deeply affected him: the Civil War (1861-65)

(he was a strong supporter of the North) and it was said to mark his poetry with

a less optimistic and more mature vein. After initially going to Washington to

care for his wounded brother, he decided to stay to help the sick and injured in

a hospital, which became a background for many of his poems such as “The

Wounded” or “Hymn of Dead Soldiers”. He felt great pity for the victims. His war

poems possess a disturbing awareness of the full meaning of war, and the

poem “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” deals with the suffering of

the young men involved in the war.

Drum Taps was written following Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 and

included two of his most famous poems, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard

Bloom’d1 and O Captain! My Captain! These poems present one of his current

themes: his faith in democracy. He was a firm believer in it, so much so that

Emerson called him America’s “great bard of democracy”. Whitman greatly

admired President Lincoln and saw him as a symbol of the goodness of

mankind.

1
Sometimes called President Lincoln’s Funeral Hymn.

12
 Whitman died in 1891. Probably the greatest poet of the century, he first

gained popularity for his enthusiasm for democracy, and even today he holds

the attention of generations due to his belief in the common man, and his

reflection of American society. For most, his appeal today is his way of

expressing the relationship of man with nature, liberating poetry from metrical

patterns to express ideas in new ways.

To sum up, in this topic I have looked at three American writers in

relation with three literary genres: Melville and the novel; Edgar Allan Poe and

the short story, and Walt Whitman’s poetry. All of them made important

contributions to the development of these genres. Melville’s Moby Dick

developed the symbolic and allegoric novel; Poe has been credited with the

invention of the detective short story as well as the evolution of the short story

and Whitman dealt with new themes in a new form: free verse.

13