An unprecedented single-volume edition of one of America's greatest poets, released to celebrate his bicentennial Best known today for his novels and stories, the author of Moby-Dick was a devoted and accomplished poet. Ranging from Civil War battlefields to the haunted byways of the Holy Land, from close observation of nature to deep philosophical mediation, Melville's poetry was central to his life and art and he justly ranks with Whitman and Dickinson as one of America's three greatest 19th-century poets. Complete here for the first time in the fourth and final installment in the Library of America's Herman Melville edition, are all four books of poetry he published in his lifetime plus uncollected poems and the poems from two projected volumes left unfinished at the time of his death, allowing readers to appreciate for themselves the extraordinary range of his poetic achievement. Melville's first book of poetry, Battle-Pieces (1866), remains one of the very few great American books to have emerged from the Civil War. Dedicated to the Union dead, it is both a deeply philosophical work of mourning and a fascinating record of events, tracking campaigns and battles and the war's immediate aftermath. With a cast of characters surpassing that of Moby-Dick, the epic poem Clarel (1876), about an American divinity student's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, has been likened to Paradise Lost and The Waste Land as a profound exploration of the problem of belief. Also included in Complete Poems are the two privately issued books John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891), which contain some of Melville's finest lyric verse. Rounding out the volume are the extraordinary poems from his two unfinished manuscripts, Weeds and Wildings and Parthenope, along with miscellaneous uncollected poems. All of the poems are presented in the authoritative Northwestern-Newberry texts.

An unprecedented single-volume edition of one of America's greatest poets, released to celebrate his bicentennial Herman Melville ranks with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as one of the three great American poets of the nineteenth century. Whether meditating on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, the mysteries of faith and doubt in the Holy Land, or the strange relationship between the Maldive Shark and the pilot fish that glide before “his Gorgonian head,” Melville’s verse combines precise physical detail and rich metaphysical speculation in an unorthodox style and with a compressed power uniquely his own. The fruit of decades of textual scholarship, this fourth and final volume of the Library of America Melville edition gathers for the first time in one volume all of Melville’s poems: the four books of poetry published in his lifetime, his uncollected poems, and the poems from two projected volumes of poetry and prose left unfinished at his death. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is both a deeply philosophical work of mourning for the Civil War dead and a fascinating record of campaigns and battles and the war’s immediate aftermath. With a cast of characters to rival Moby-Dick, the epic poem Clarel, about a young American divinity student’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land, plumbs the profound existential and religious questions that haunted Melville throughout his life. In two late privately issued books, the retrospective John Marr and Other Sailors and Timoleon Etc., the aging poet returns to the nautical scenes and reading of his youth. Many of the poems in the two manuscripts left unfinished at Melville’s death, Weeds and Wildings and Parthenope, have not been previously available in a reliable trade edition.

Whitman and Dickinson are the two greatest American poets of the nineteenth century, but who is the third? Some critics say Whittier, others say Poe, and these days an increasing number say Herman Melville. The revaluation of Melville's poetry is due in large part to the influence of this landmark volume, for Melville the poet has never found a more judicious, eloquent, or persuasive champion than Robert Penn Warren.

In this revised edition Douglas Robillard updates the scholarship on his poetry through the introduction and notes. It contains entire texts of Battle-Pieces, John Marr and Other Sailors and Timeoleon. Selected cantos from Clarel are reprinted with accompanying notes and commentary.

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.

"This volume aims primarily at presenting an accurate text of all the poems which Herman Melville left to posterity, Clarel, for obvious reasons, excepted. The text of the first 256 pages faithfully follows that of the three volumes of poetry published during Melville's lifetime and under his scrupulous supervision; the text for the rest of the poetry is taken from manuscripts, of which all but three are in the Houghton Library, Harvard College."--Preface, p. v.